The scope of social attention deficits in autism: Prioritized orienting to people and animals in static natural scenes

Abstract

A central feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an impairment in ‘social attention’ — the prioritized processing of socially-relevant information, e.g. the eyes and face. Socially relevant stimuli are also preferentially attended in a broader categorical sense, however: observers orient preferentially to people and animals (compared to inanimate objects) in complex natural scenes. To measure the scope of social attention deficits in autism, observers viewed alternating versions of a natural scene on each trial, and had to ‘spot the difference’ between them —where the difference involved either an animate or inanimate object. Change detection performance was measured as an index of attentional prioritization. Individuals with ASD showed the same prioritized social attention for animate categories as did control participants. This could not be explained by lower-level visual factors, since the effects disappeared when using blurred or inverted images. These results suggest that social attention — and its impairment in autism — may not be a unitary phenomenon: impairments in visual processing of specific social cues may occur despite intact categorical prioritization of social agents.

Interest towards human, animal and object in children with autism spectrum disorders: an ethological approach at home

“…Furthermore, interest towards animate agents was observed here, as the ASD children directed more gazes at, and more behaviours towards, the pet and the human beings, especially their parent. These results confirm previous studies using a lab setting with static stimuli [49] or using direct observations [59], and contrast the widely supposed lack of interest in people [16,36]. Turning towards their parent rather than towards the observer could be explained by processing deficits related to face configuration of the picture [31,41] and dysfunction of the fusiform face area [58] when in the presence of unfamiliar faces.…”

“…For example, both children and adult with ASD have been presented to a change detection performance task to assess attention [49]. New et al [49] observations on ASD alternating animate or inanimate stimuli in a natural setting, reported a significant difference between the two types of stimuli. Interestingly, individuals with ASD are able to pay real attention, especially to human beings.…”

“…human and animal) as participants with TD. In this paper, New et al [49] suggested to study attention as an additional dimension to social interaction in the observations of perception and cognition in ASD, especially in ethology related field work.…”

Relating Attentional Biases for Stimuli Associated with Social Reward and Punishment to Autistic Traits

“…Rather than measure attention to social stimuli, such as faces, which has been more extensively studied in the context of autism and autistic traits (e.g., Chawarska, & Shic, 2009;Chawarska, Volkmar, & Klin, 2010;Chevallier et al, 2012;Dawson et al, 1998Dawson et al, , 2005Elsabbagh et al, 2013;Fischer et al, 2014;Fletcher-Watson et al, 2008;Kikuchi et al, 2011;New et al, 2010;Schultz, 2005;Sheth et al, 2011;van der Geest et al, 2001), our experimental task was specifically designed to measure the ability of social feedback to shape attention to the stimuli that predict such feedback. Specifically, we measured the degree to which attention is biased towards stimuli that are associated with a high probability of being followed by valent reactions.…”

“…While some studies have provided evidence for reduced attention to social stimuli (Chawarska, & Shic, 2009;Chawarska, Volkmar, & Klin, 2010;Chevallier et al, 2012;Dawson et al, 1998Dawson et al, , 2005Kikuchi et al, 2011;Schultz, 2005), cases of unimpaired attention, with intact and robust preferences for social stimuli, have also been reported (Elsabbagh et al, 2013;Fischer et al, 2014;Fletcher-Watson et al, 2008;New et al, 2010;Sheth et al, 2011;van der Geest et al, 2001). It seems not to be the case that autism can be explained simply by a broad tendency to ignore social information across situations and contexts.…”