Autistic preschoolers display reduced attention orientation for competition but intact facilitation from a parallel competitor: Eye-tracking and behavioral data.
Luodi Yu, Zhiren Wang, Yuebo Fan and 2 others
PMID 38514915WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic preschoolers looked less at competitive games than peers, yet performed motor and sorting tasks just as fast when competing alongside an adult.
Parallel play offers immediate social facilitation benefits even when visual attention to competition is reduced.
Key findings
01Autistic children directed significantly less visual attention to competition videos than typically developing children, but showed similar attention to cooperation videos.
02Both autistic and typically developing groups improved their speed on motor and card-sorting tasks when competing against a partner, with no significant difference in the size of this improvement between groups.
03There was no significant correlation between the eye-tracking measures of attention and the behavioral performance improvements once age was controlled.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was relatively small, particularly after excluding participants with insufficient data (final N for eye-tracking was 23 autistic and 18 TD). The eye-tracking and behavioral tasks were conducted in a lab setting, which may not fully reflect real-world social dynamics. The study could not determine if the performance improvement was due to understanding the verbal rules of competition or simply observing the partner's actions. The competitive partner was an adult teacher, so results may not generalize to peer-to-peer competition. The authors note that while the competition was designed to be non-hostile, it is unclear how autistic children perceived the social intent, and potential negative effects of competition were not measured.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The research was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that reduced visual attention to competition in eye-tracking predicts poor behavioral performance. The study found that autistic children benefited from parallel competition just as much as their peers, even though they looked at competitive videos less. Visual attention patterns in this context did not correlate with task improvement.