The Impact Of Scene Complexity To Autism Children In The Process Of Social Scene

Autism spectrum disorder is one kind of neurological development disorders centered inimpaired social interaction which is the autism’s most obvious social cognitive defect.Obtaining information from the social scene is a key step in social activities. Face especiallyeyes are the most important source of social information. With the social scene complexityincreasing, the watching in eye area of normal development children also increases. Previousstudies have found that, autism children show an abnormal process in social scene. They havedifficulties in face recognition and processing and they avoid eye contact. To explore theinfluence of complexity to autism children’ processing in social scene, we chose3-9yearsold autism children and the age matched normally developing children. Let them watchpictures of social scene and then collect their eye movement indicators.In the first study we asked subjects to watch real outdoor social pictures which containeddifferent number of people. The results showed that as the number of people in the socialscene increasing, the viewing time of face was increased of normal children, mainly in themouth. But there was no difference in eye area. The complexity didn’t have an impact on theviewing time of face of autism children. Autism children’ fixation duration, fixation countsand observation length were less than the normal children in the in face and mouth, but in thetwo groups there wasn’t a significant effect on the eyes’ viewing time.When weakening the authenticity of the social scene, we let the subjects view socialscenes of cartoon (study2) and stick figure (study3). Results showed that as the same withthe normal children, autism children’ fixation duration, fixation counts and observation lengthwere all increased when the complexity increased in the eye area of the social scene (cartoonand stick figure), but when coming to the mouth all were decreased. Eyes got more viewingtime than mouth in both two groups. But autism children’ viewing time of figures (like body,face, eye, and mouth) were significantly less than normal children. And the two groups didn’thave differences in viewing time of the backgrounds when the social scene’s complexity of cartoon changed, but decreased in the social scene of stick figure.In summary, enhancing the complexity of the real social scene changed the processingstrategy of normal children, but there was no impact on autism children. When theauthenticity was decreased, autism children showed the similarity with normal children in theprocessing strategy of social scene and both influenced by the complexity.