Bottom-up attention orienting in young children with autism

Abstract

We examined the impact of simultaneous bottom-up visual influences and meaningful social stimuli on attention orienting in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Relative to typically-developing age and sex matched participants, children with ASDs were more influenced by bottom-up visual scene information regardless of whether social stimuli and bottom-up scene properties were congruent or competing. This initial reliance on bottom-up strategies correlated with severity of social impairment as well as receptive language impairments. These data provide support for the idea that there is enhanced reliance on bottom-up attention strategies in ASDs, and that this may have a negative impact on social and language development.

Fig. 1

Depicts sample images shown to participants. a Congruent Condition—Faces are ‘winner-take-all’ most salient (Face Primary AOI). b Incongruent Condition—Faces are not ‘winner-take-all’ most salient (Face Secondary AOI)

Fig. 2

a Example of Congruent condition and associated heat map. Intensity bar on the left indicates saliency values. Hot colors represent higher saliency values. The face region is the ‘winner-take-all’ salient area in the Congruent condition. b Example of Incongruent condition and associated heat map. The ‘winner-take-all’ salient region is not the face in this condition. All heat maps derived from MATLAB SaliencyToolbox (Walther and Koch 2006)

Fig. 3

a Input image with superimposed 16 × 25 matrix grid. b Individual feature maps. Hotter colors represent locations that differ from their neighbors along each intensity, orientation, or color dimension. Values were extracted from the Saliency Toolbox for each location in the 16 × 25 matrix grid per feature map. These were used as predictors to derive beta coefficients for each individual subject’s data, illustrated in (c)

Fig. 4

Depicts proportion of salient primary AOIs versus secondary salient AOIs attended in children with ASDs relative to TD children

Fig. 5

Beta coefficients for the total trial durations in the face present analysis by group for both congruent and incongruent conditions

Fig. 6

Saliency map beta coefficient data with faces absent from the matrix prior to individual subject regressions

Fig. 7

Correlations between the difference score of saliency map values in the congruent condition (faces present–faces absent) and a ADOS social affect scores and b PLS receptive language scores in children with ASDs. High positive values along the x-axis indicate a pattern more consistent with TD children