Attention Allocation During Exploration of Visual Arrays in ASD: Results from the ABC-CT Feasibility Study.
Tawny Tsang, Adam J Naples, Erin C Barney and 14 others
PMID 35657448WHAT IT FOUND
Children with autism looked at faces less and made fewer fixations on them than typically developing peers.
They also spent less time looking at objects overall. The visual task took two minutes and was well-tolerated by children with a wide range of abilities.
Key findings
01Children with ASD had significantly lower face looking time percentages than typically developing controls, even after accounting for IQ and age.
02Children with ASD made significantly fewer fixations to faces (less detail orientation) than controls, but showed no difference in fixations to non-social objects.
03The visual exploration paradigm takes approximately two minutes and is well-tolerated by children with a broad range of cognitive and social abilities.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was small (46 participants), which limits the ability to detect subtle relationships between eye-tracking metrics and clinical symptoms. The visual arrays contained only five objects, which may have been too simple to reveal differences in 'exploration' or 'perseveration' seen in studies with more complex scenes. There was a significant difference in IQ between the groups, with the ASD group having lower full-scale IQ scores than the typically developing group, although the analysis controlled for this. The study was a feasibility pilot, meaning its primary aim was to test the protocol rather than to provide definitive evidence on the clinical utility of the task.
Declared interests
The study was part of the Autism Biomarker Consortium-Clinical Trials (ABC-CT), funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI). The authors declared no other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of difference in looking at non-social objects as evidence that children with ASD have intact visual attention for all stimuli. The reduced attention to faces was specific to social information, and the simplicity of the task (only five items) may have masked other attentional differences that would appear in more complex, real-world scenes.