An Experimental Study On The Selective Attention For Social Information In Children With Autism

Social deficits of communication and interactions are key deficits of Autism. Precious researches showed that the individuals with autism have attentive deficits on viewing eyes, facial expressions, body activities including social information. Nowadays, the explosions on social deficits of individuals with autism mainly focus on the Theory of Mind deficits, aberrant brain function and neurodevelopment of the social cognition network, rapid visual-motion integration deficits and weak Central Convergence theory. It will be the developing trend in cognitive research to focus on the selective attention and visual fixation patterns during viewing of static information and dynamic visual information in individuals with autism.The current eye-tracking study explores how individuals with autism (N=35, form13special educational schools in Shanghai) and typical developed children (N=35, from one typical kindergarten in Shanghai) preferentially attend to basic facial expressions of the same model, cartoon and movie extracts containing cartoon characters and human actors.The results of experiment1:in the static facial expression task, the variation of First Fixation Duration (FFD) and Fixation Duration (FD) between children with autism and typical developed children are significant. In the selective attention of different types of facial expressions task, the variation of Fixation Count (FC) is significant.The results of experiment2:in the dynamic cartoon social situations social situations task, the variation of Time to First Fixation (TFF) and FC between children with autism and typical developed children are significant. In the selective attention of different types of dynamic cartoon social situations task, the variation of FFD and FC are significant.The results of experiment3:in the dynamic human social situations task, the variation of TFF and FC between children with autism and typical developed children are significant. In the selective attention of different types of dynamic human social situations task, the variation of TFF and FC are significant.The basic conclusions:(1) in the static facial expression task, children with autism have less interest in facial expression, and can't pay attention to facial information continuously; children show the attentive bias effect on negative expression, pay more attention to mouth regions of positive expressions and eye regions of negative expressions.(2) in the dynamic social situation task, the social orientation on social situations of children with autism is difficult, and the attentive processing effect is limited; children can search the positive social information faster, but pay more attention to negative social information.