Kind And Hostile Intention Understanding In Children With High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder

Understanding the communicative intention of others accurately is the starting mechanism of social communication,and understanding the kind and hostile intentions in communicative intentions plays an important role in social communication.Prior study indicates the children with Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD)have deficits in understanding others' intentions and social avoidance.For exploring the eye-tracking processing characteristics of children with High-Functioning Autism(HFA)(IQ ? 70)when they are understanding kind and hostile intentions,the following two series of studies were designed by using eye-tracking techniques.Study 1.Two sub-experiments were conducted to explore the eye-tracking difference between HFA group and TD group when observing the kind and hostile intentions in cartoon,which possessed lower ecological validity.Experiment 1: 21 HFA and 21 age-matched TD children were asked to observe and understanding the kind and hostile intentions in cartoon pictures with lower ecological validity.Experiment 2: In order to further control the effect of intelligence level on intention understanding,10 HFA and 10 Age-IQ-matched TD children were asked to observe and understanding the kind and hostile intention in cartoon pictures with lower ecological validity.Behaviour results in Experiment 1 and 2 both showed that HFA group could understand kind and hostile intention of virtual characters,but the ability of intention understanding were worse than that of TD group.And eye-tracking results showed HFA group were significantly lower than TD group in fixation duration and fixation count in the interactive communication area of virtual characters.Study 2.Two sub-experiments were conducted to explore the eye-tracking difference between HFA group and TD group when observing kind and hostile intentions in the higher ecological validity real photos.Experiment 3: The same participants as experiment 1 were asked to observe and understanding the kind and hostile intention in the higher ecological validity real photos.Experiment 4: The same participants as experiment 2 were asked to observe and understanding the kind and hostile intention in the higher ecological validity real photos.Behaviour results in Experiment 3 and 4 also both showed that HFA group couldunderstand kind and hostile intention of real characters,but the ability of intention understanding were worse than that of TD group.Moreover,the eye-tracking results in Experiment 3 showed HFA group were significantly lower than TD group in fixation count in the interactive communication area of real characters,while the eye-tracking results in Experiment 4 showed that there were no significant difference between HFA group and TD group.In conclusion,HFA group showed a lower ability to understand the kind and hostile intention expressed by dyadic body movements than TD group,and illustrate the developmental delays and Theory of Mind(ToM)deficiency.