Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Mouga, Susana
• Castelhano, João
• Café, Cátia
• Sousa, Daniela
• Duque, Frederico
• Oliveira, Guiomar
• Castelo-Branco, Miguel

Titel

Social Attention Deficits in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Task Dependence of Objects vs. Faces Observation Bias

Ist Teil von

• Frontiers in psychiatry, 2021-03, Vol.12, p.640599-640599

Ort / Verlag

Switzerland: Frontiers Media S.A

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Social attention deficits represent a central impairment of patients suffering from autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the nature of such deficits remains controversial. We compared visual attention regarding social (faces) vs. non-social stimuli (objects), in an ecological diagnostic context, in 46 children and adolescents divided in two groups: ASD ( = 23) and typical neurodevelopment (TD) ( = 23), matched for chronological age and intellectual performance. Eye-tracking measures of visual scanning, while exploring and describing scenes from three different tasks from the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), were analyzed: "Description of a Picture," "Cartoons," and "Telling a Story from a Book." Our analyses revealed a three-way interaction between Group, Task, and Social vs. Object Stimuli. We found a striking main effect of group and a task dependence of attentional allocation: while the TD attended first and longer to faces, ASD participants became similar to TD when they were asked to look at pictures while telling a story. Our results suggest that social attention allocation is task dependent, raising the question whether spontaneous attention deficits can be rescued by guiding goal-directed actions.