An Experimental Study Of Attentional Orientation To Gaze Cues In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Individuals can actively follow others’ gaze and turn their attention to the direction of others’ gaze.This ability is known as gaze-triggered attention orientation.Through other people’s eyes,people can realize other people’s attention target,intention and other information.With the ability of attention orientation to gaze,the individual’s language acquisition,theory of mind and other advanced social cognitive ability can be successfully developed.Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD)have gazetriggered attentional orienting impairment,an inability to follow the gaze of others to a target object.Gaze-triggered attentional orienting impairment in ASD individuals may contribute to their social interaction deficits.The study of gaze-triggered attentional orienting in ASD is beneficial to their social cognition development.Gaze cue-target paradigm is widely used to explore the ability of gaze-triggered attentional orienting in ASD individuals.In the study of simple gaze cue-target paradigm,ASD individuals showed normal attention orientation of gaze cue.In the study of complex gaze cue-target paradigm,ASD individuals showed abnormal attention orientation of gaze cue.The two-process theory of face processing provides a theoretical framework to explain the differences:individuals with ASD are born with impaired subcortical pathway and abnormal acquired cortical pathways.They cannot understand the social meaning of gaze,and can only process the physical orientation of the gaze cue in a way that processes non-social information.In order to verify the above theoretical hypothesis,this study used the gaze cuetarget paradigm to explore the gaze-triggered attentional orienting in ASD individuals.The subjects were 15 High-functioning Autism(HFA)children and 15 Typically Development(TD)children.The first part(experiment 1 and experiment 2)explores the influence of physical spatial on gaze-triggered attentional orienting in ASD individuals.Experiment 1 is a three-factor mixed experiment design of(2(subject type:ASD children,TD children)×2(cue effectiveness:effective,ineffective)×2(spatial resolution:low spatial resolution,high spatial resolution).Experiment 1 shows that spatial frequency does not affect the attention orienting on gaze cues in ASD children.When the gaze cues were presented in the form of low-spatial frequency faces,ASD children also showed normal gaze-triggered attentional orienting.Experiment 2 is a three-factor mixed experiment design of 2(subject type:ASD children,TD children)×2(cue effectiveness:effective,ineffective)×2(initial fixation point:mouth,eye).Experiment 2 shows that the position of the initial fixation point affects the attention orientation on gaze cues in ASD individuals.Compared with the initial fixation point located in the eye,when the initial fixation point located in the mouth ASD children showed less amount of gaze-cueing effect.However,there was no significant difference in the amount of gaze-cueing effect in TD children.The second part(experiment 3 and experiment 4)explores the influence of social background information on gaze-triggered attentional orienting in ASD individuals.Experiment 3 was a three-factor mixed experiment design of 2(subject type:ASD children,TD children)×2(cue effectiveness:effective,ineffective)×2(target type:fearful vocal stimuli,neutral vocal stimuli).Experiment 3 shows that in tasks with the same emotional value of target stimulus and cue stimulus,ASD children showed abnormal attention orientation to gaze cues.Experiment 4 was a four-factor mixed experiment design of 2(subject type:ASD children,TD children)×2(cue effectiveness:effective,ineffective)×2(cue type:arrow,gaze)×2(cue consistency:consistent,inconsistent).Experiment 4 shows that,under the condition of arrow cues,compared with TD children,the attention orientation of ASD children is more easily affected by interference information.Under the condition of gaze cues,compared with ASD children,the attention orientation of TD individuals is less susceptible to interference information.Based on the above analysis,the main conclusions of this study are as follows:The abnormal development of cortical pathways in ASD individuals prevents them from understanding the social significance of gaze.ASD individuals process gaze cues in a way that processes nonsocial information.Gaze-triggered attentional orienting impairment in ASD individuals was associated with the impairment of multi-sensory integration ability and cognitive control disorder.