The Problem with Using Eye-Gaze to Infer Desire: A Deficit of Cue Inference in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder?

Abstract

Children with autism respond atypically to eye-gaze cues, arguably because they fail to understand that eye-gaze conveys mentalistic information. Three experiments investigated whether a difficulty in inferring desire from eye-gaze in autism reflects a failure to understand the mentalistic significance of eye-gaze, an inhibitory deficit or a deficit of cue inference. While there was an inhibitory component to the tasks, children with autism were no more affected by this than controls. In addition, individuals' impairment in inferring desire was not limited to social cues, but was also observed when desire was cued by more general cues. Consequently, children with autism may have a general deficit in using arbitrary cues to make inferences, which impacts particularly on their social development.

Inhibition and the Validity of the Stroop Task for Children with Autism

“…The existing literature in autism is perhaps consistent with this suggestion, as studies that have used response suppression tasks, such as walk/donot walk tasks, have tended to show deficits in CWA (Christ et al 2007;Ozonoff and McEvoy 1994) while other studies, including the current study, have shown that CWA perform comparably to controls on Stroop-like tasks (Bryson 1983;Christ et al 2007). That said, other studies using Stoop-like tasks or other cognitive tests of inhibition such as the Day/Night task or the Flanker task have not consistently shown individuals with autism to be unimpaired (Ames and Jarrold 2007;Christ et al 2007;Russell et al 1999).…”

“…However, Simpson and Riggs (2005b) noted that this task also involves a degree of arbitrary response mapping, because individuals are not simply asked to give the opposite response (e.g., 'sun', 'moon') to the presented picture. It is important to note that Russell et al (1999) did not find group differences between CWA and controls when using the 'Day/Night' task, but that Ames and Jarrold (2007) did find deficits in the CWA when they used the 'Dog/Pig' task in which a truly 'opposite' response was required to each image. These findings suggest that the semantic demands of an 'inhibition' task can play a significant role in the amount of interference which CWA experience.…”

“…The existing literature in this area is somewhat equivocal, with some research finding no differences between CWA and typically developing controls on inhibition tasks (Bryson 1983;Eskes et al 1990;Goldberg et al 2005;Griffith et al 1999;Iarocci and Burack 2004;Lopez et al 2005;Ozonoff and Jensen 1999;Ozonoff and Strayer 1997;Russell et al 1999), while other studies have shown deficits (Ames and Jarrold 2007;Bishop and Norbury 2005;Christ et al 2007;Geurts et al 2004;Minshew et al 1999;. One potential explanation for this discrepancy follows from the fact that tasks borrowed from the adult literature may not always be appropriate for use with a developmental sample (Anderson 1998;Archibald and Kerns 1999).…”

Social stimuli interfere with cognitive control in autism

“…Although individuals with autism demonstrate deficits in coordinating visual attention with others (i.e., joint attention) and understanding the mental states of others on the basis of information gathered from the eyes (e.g., Loveland & Landry, 1986;Mundy, Sigman, Ungerer, & Sherman, 1986;Baron-Cohen, 1995;Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001), such deficits in gaze processing do not appear to be based in eye gaze direction discrimination per se. Baron-Cohen (1995) demonstrated that such deficits appear to be characterized by impairments in using gaze to understand the mental states of others, and recent behavioral studies confirms that automatic attentional shifts in responses to static gaze direction are intact in individuals with autism (Kylliainen & Hietanen, 2004;Senju, Tojo, Dairoku, & Hasegawa, 2004;Ames & Jarrold, 2006;Bayliss & Tipper, 2005;Burgos, Kaplan, Foss-Feig, Kenworthy, Gilotty, Lee, Girton, Gaillard, & Vaidya, 2005). This pattern of findings suggests that autism is not characterized by deficits in reflexive attention orienting to gaze direction.…”

Identifying Symbolic Relationships in Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Deficit in the Identification of Temporal Co-occurrence?

“…The discovery that precursors to theory of mind are dependent on symbolic understanding would provide strong support for the causal priority of domain-general mechanisms. Our own research has demonstrated that individuals with ASD experience difficulties in making desire-based inferences on the basis of directional cues other than eye-gaze (Ames and Jarrold 2007). This suggests that it is determining the information conveyed by a cue, rather than the specific form of the cue itself, which is problematic for children with ASD.…”