| Autism spectrum disorders（ASD）are referred to as pervasive developmentaldisorders(PDD),characterized by deficits in social reciprocity and communicationability, and by unusual restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behaviors,interests and activities, the social interaction disorder is a core specific symptom, andautistic disorder(AD) is the most severe symptom in the spectrum. Social attentiondeficit is an important performance of social disorder, they usually have not noticedothers; at two-three years, there is some difficulties in social interaction, eyes contact,share attention, face recognition. And these early damages affect the development ofsocial communication and language, which is formed in the late stage. The first stepof social attention is detecting and processing social cues effectively, thus, socialattention deficits of ASD may result from the difficulty in processing the social cues.In order to explore cues-target influence the social attention of autism children,this paper have selected two group’s children aged from three to seven years: sixteenautistic children and typically developing children designed five experiments, andthey were made to watch picture. Each picture contains one clue and four categoriesof objects, and clues toward one of the objects. This paper use eye-trackingtechnology to collect eye movement date.Experiment1investigated that the processing characteristic of autistic childrenunder the condition without external cues. The result showed a significant groupdifference in processing targets.On the basis of experiment1, experiment2and3added arrow clues and gesturepoint clues respectively, explored the autistic children’s processing and followingability. The result showed that, under such condition, the autistic children weresignificantly weaker than typically developing children on the processing andfollowing ability; also, under the valid clue conditions, the autistic children have spentless time than the typically developing children on fixation duration and observation length of target.Experiment4and5used eyes and head as clue, and the head did not move inexperiment4, but the head did move in the experiment5, in order to investigate theautistic children’s processing characteristic of clues. The results were as follows:under the eyes gaze conditions, the autistic children and the typically developingchildren have spent longer time on eyes than mouth; but there were no significantdifferences on the fixation duration and observation length between groups; under thehead and eyes conditions, the autistic children have spent less time on the fixationduration and observation length of eyes and mouth, and the autistic children havespent less time on eyes than mouth. Also, the autistic children have spent less timethan the typically developing children on the observation length of face. But therewere no significant differences on watching face between groups; the autistic childrenwere significantly weaker than typically developing children on the processing andfollowing ability.This study suggests that, autistic children have difficult in following andprocessing clues, so that influence their social attention. |
