Circumscribed Interests and Attention in Autism: The Role of Biological Sex.
Clare Harrop, Desiree Jones, Shuting Zheng and 3 others
PMID 29777472WHAT IT FOUND
Boys and girls with autism looked at pictures in sex-typical ways in this eye-tracking task: boys favored male images, girls favored female images.
The sex-typical pattern appeared in both groups. The authors suggest using sex-matched interests in assessment and therapy, not only male-typical toys.
Key findings
01Females across diagnoses looked at more female images than males.
02Females spent more time fixating female images, and males spent more time fixating male images.
03Children with autism and children without autism did not differ overall in how many images they explored, how long they fixated images, or how much detail they inspected.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Two ASD participants did not complete the eye-tracking task, and two children did not have sufficient fixation data. The autism and control groups were not perfectly matched: the autism group was older than the control group, and autism males were older than both control groups. There were marginal differences in mental age between diagnostic groups and between sexes, and males with autism had a higher mental age than females with autism. The typically developing control groups were smaller than the autism groups, which may have reduced the ability to detect diagnosis effects. The children did not view the original circumscribed-interest arrays, so the study cannot say whether autism females would have shown the previously reported attention to items such as road signs, trains or electronics. The image-category survey was small (n = 20), familiarity with the toys was not measured, and some images reflected trends at the time of data collection.
Declared interests
No funding or conflicts of interest are reported. The paper states that all subjects were reimbursed with a gift card.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that autism causes restricted attention to circumscribed interests. The main differences were between girls and boys, not between children with autism and children without autism. Children with autism did not differ overall from children without autism in how many images they explored, how long they fixated images, or how much detail they inspected after age controls.