Evidence of a reduced role for circumscribed interests in the social attention patterns of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Z Ambarchi, K A Boulton, R Thapa and 5 others
PMID 35927513WHAT IT FOUND
Children with autism looked less at faces than typical peers.
High-interest objects also pulled typical children's attention, so interests alone did not explain the lower face looking.
Key findings
01The autism group took longer to first look at the face than the typically developing group, with an average difference of 0.557 seconds.
02Both groups showed less preference for faces when paired with high-interest objects, and both groups preferred high-interest objects over low-interest objects.
03In the autism group, more fixation time on faces overall and on faces next to low-interest objects was associated with lower restricted and repetitive behaviour severity on the ADOS-2.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The eye-tracking sample was smaller than the enrolled sample: 20 children had no eye-tracking data and 2 were excluded for poor gaze quality. The autism group was mostly male, and the study was too small to analyse sex differences. The task was not designed to test overall attention reduction, and object areas were smaller than face areas, which may have biased looking. The high-interest objects were not personalised, and the type of interest may affect attention patterns. Correlations with symptom severity and social functioning were exploratory and need replication. The autism group had lower mean nonverbal IQ scores than the typical group (97.24 versus 116.04), though the authors did not use it as a covariate. The study did not test an intervention or diagnostic procedure.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with autism avoid faces because of their interests. The lower face looking was not only an autism-specific effect, because high-interest objects also pulled attention in typical children. This was an observational eye-tracking task, not a test of treatment.