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. 2010 Jan;48(1):51-9.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.08.008.

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

Joshua J New  1 , Robert T Schultz, Julie Wolf, Jeffrey L Niehaus, Ami Klin, Tamsin C German, Brian J Scholl
Affiliations

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

Joshua J New et al. Neuropsychologia. 2010 Jan.

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.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
A depiction of the change detection method: participants must detect and identify the difference between an original image and changed image.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Examples of each of the four scene categories. The target objects are circled here, but of course this highlighting was not present in the actual displays.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Examples of the image manipulations used for the separate groups of adult control participants: (a) Scene inversion, and (b) Blurring.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Average change detection latency and accuracy for each of the four semantic categories (people, animals, artifacts, and plants) for each of the three participant groups: (a) typically developing child controls, (b) participants with ASD, and (c) adult controls.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Change detection latency as a function of ASD participant age for (a) people relative to artifacts, and (b) animals relative to artifacts.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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