The Social Attention Of Autism Spectrum Disorders Children

As a developmental disorder, the incidence rate of Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is rising in recent years, and people pay more and more attention to it. Although the diagnostic standard of ASD is still revised and perfected in continuously, the impairment of social communication is always the core symptoms of ASD. Social attention is the initial step of social information processing, so social attention deficit has been the key to understand social communication deficit of ASD.Saliency and lively as the two characteristics of social stimuli, by changing them appeared in the picture, and analyse visual processing characteristics of subjects, the influence on one’s social attention would be explored, and the characteristics of social attention would be understood. Because it is non-invasive and the participants are not required to get feedback in the process of the experiments, the eye movement technique is suitable to reflect the visual processing ability of children with ASD. Three experiments were involved in current research, which required 16 children with or without ASD, age 3-8 years, to look at a range of pictures whilst having their gaze behavior monitored by eye tracking technology. Changing the saliency and lively of the social stimuli presented in the pictures, the nature of visual processing of participants would be investigated, and the characteristics of the social attention would be discussed.The improved paradigm of face-in-the-crowd is used in the series of the experimental designs, showing the participants a series of pictures and let them free to watch, collecting eye movement data. There are one target figure (or face) and five interference figures (or faces) which are different from the target present on each picture, and the saliency of the social stimuli is being showed. By changing the contents of the target and the interference figures (or faces), the lively of the social stimuli is also being showed.The pictures in experiment 1 are simple geometry figures, which represent the non-social stimulus. The results of experiment 1 show that:as normal children, children with ASD can also pay attention to target stimuli, there is no significant difference between the visual processing ability of the two. The pictures in experiment 2 are stick figures with emotional faces, which represent the simple social stimulus. The results of experiment 2 show that:as normal children, children with ASD can also pay attention to target stimuli, but their ability of visual processing are weaker then normal children. The pictures in experiment 3 are real emotional faces, which represent the real social stimulus. The results of experiment 3 show that:as normal children, children with ASD can also pay attention to target stimuli, but their ability of visual processing continue to decline. The negative emotion can be detected fasted and has more visual processing than the other two emotions, but the difference of the positive emotion and the neutral emotion is not obvious.From the cross experiment comparison results, visual processing ability of children with ASD is declining with the increasing social degree of the stimulus. They have social attention deficit, but they have similar visual processing mode with normal children. We can improve the prognosis by changing social stimuli presenting mode in the intervention training in children with ASD.