Studies On Social Information Processing Of Children With Autism In Picture-Book Reading

Numerous studies have found that autism is characterized by social withdrawal and lack of interest in socially relevant information. However, little attention has been paid to their social information processing in picture-book reading, which is now a new focus to understand more about their social deficits.By analyzing eye-movement data and narrative data collected in picture-book reading, this study compared16children with autism and16matched typically developing children on their characteristics of social and non-social information processing.Conclusions obtained by eye movement experiments are as follows:(1) Overall, children with autism paid significantly more attention to socially noncritical region than typically developing children did, and paid significantly less attention to socially critical region (especially human and animal roles) than typically developing children did.(2) The area and concentration of social stimuli and the length of stories may influence the way children read picture books. Compared with typically developing children, children with autism were easily distracted by socially irrelevant information.(3) In those critical regions, children with autism not only pay significantly less attention to human faces (especially human’s mouths), but they may also pay significantly less attention to other parts of human bodies.(4) Listening to story-telling recordings while reading picture books made both groups of children significantly decrease their attention to socially noncritical information, while critically increase their attention to human bodies and their faces.Conclusions obtained by narrative experiments are as follows:(1) Results obtained by recall task and picture-talk task are very different.(2) In the recall task, proportion of intentional description of children with autism is significantly smaller than typically developing children’s.(3) However, in the picture-talk task, not only proportion of intentional description, but proportion of thought, feeling and other sensory descriptions in children with autism are also significantly smaller. By contrast, the proportion of mechanical description of children with autism is significantly larger than the control group.At the end of this study, a summary has been made and conclusions have been further discussed.