| The human eye, as one of the most important perception pathways in human, is itself a delicate way to express and receive information. Eye gazing cues play a central role in the process of socialization in human being. However, clinical research indicated that one of the characterizing deficits of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in their early years is failure of looking into others' eyes, and orienting their attention to follow others' gazing cues. In recent years, with the development of the target-cue paradigm in cognitive psychology experiments and application of eye tracking technology, there is feasibility for investigators to further examine behavioral and physiological mechanism underlying visual attention in individuals with ASD. Based on the literature review of past10years, the key topics in this area are:whether ASD children pay attention to others' gazing cues or not, how they use the information from the cues. But, even now there is not a clear picture about features of visual attention in ASD children due to the paucity of empirical studies in this field and inconsistent findings available.This dissertation will elaborate eye gazing cue effect on visual attention in ASD children on basis of the paradigm of cue-target and eye tracking technology. We hope in doing so to make clear of the feature of visual attention in ASD children and provide objective suggestion for early intervention and education in ASD children.Forty six ASD children, forty three children with Intellectual Disabilities and forty four Typical Developed children matching with age, and intelligence are enrolled in this research. We launched two sets of experiments and one set of survey. The first set includes five experiments and the second set includes three tasks and one survey to examine the influence of single endogenous cue, animatic and realistic eye gazing cue, simultaneous double endogenous cue, and simultaneous face direction cue on visual attention in ASD children. Our findings were presented as following:1. ASD children have the capacity to pay their attention to the area of others' eyes and eye gazing cue, and they show an extremely rapid reaction to direct gazing cue. 2. Though the reaction time to single endogenous cues is a little bit slower for ASD children, no significant difference was found among three groups of children. ASD children were found to show relative high sensitivity to specific types of cues such as real eye gazing cue compared with the other two samples.3. No priority of animatic eye gazing cue effect on visual attention was found in ASD children. Interestingly, they showed faster speed of attention processing realistic eye gazing cue, highlighted from a man's face photo.4. For double cues, ASD children did not show significant difference of reaction time compared to children in control groups. All of them processed the simultaneous information in the trends of single cue processing.5. Compared to the condition of simultaneously presenting both arrow and finger, the condition which showed both face direction and eye gazing cues at the same time have additive effects on visual attention in ASD children.6. Discrete in visual attention process affect ASD children's understanding and applying of the information coming from eye gazing cue.As summary, though the ASD children in this research are not high functioning, they still showed capability to take advantage of eye gazing cue for attention, which was more than we had expected. Specifically, the primitive attention processing is intact in ASD children. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that this kind of ability to eye gazing cue might be under-estimated. Future studies could examine behavioral, psychological and physiological mechanism in autism children with different function level to understand the feature of visual attention in these samples. And we hope the finding would be helpful to develop the suitable invention strategies and explore their latent capacity in children with autism spectrum disorders.
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