A few of my favorite things: circumscribed interests in autism are not accompanied by increased attentional salience on a personalized selective attention task

Owen E Parsons,Andrew P Bayliss,Anna Remington

doi:10.1186/s13229-017-0132-1

Owen E Parsons, Andrew P Bayliss + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-017-0132-1

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Abstract

BackgroundAutistic individuals commonly show circumscribed or “special” interests: areas of obsessive interest in a specific category. The present study investigated what impact these interests have on attention, an aspect of autistic cognition often reported as altered. In neurotypical individuals, interest and expertise have been shown to result in an automatic attentional priority for related items. Here, we examine whether this change in salience is also seen in autism.MethodsAdolescents and young adults with and without autism performed a personalized selective attention task assessing the level of attentional priority afforded to images related to the participant’s specific interests. In addition, participants performed a similar task with generic images in order to isolate any effects of interest and expertise. Crucially, all autistic and non-autistic individuals recruited for this study held a strong passion or interest. As such, any differences in attention could not be solely attributed to differing prevalence of interests in the two groups. In both tasks, participants were asked to perform a central target-detection task while ignoring irrelevant distractors (related or unrelated to their interests). The level of distractor interference under various task conditions was taken as an indication of attentional priority.ResultsNeurotypical individuals showed the predicted attentional priority for the circumscribed interest images but not generic items, reflecting the impact of their interest and expertise. Contrary to predictions, autistic individuals did not show this priority: processing the interest-related stimuli only when task demands were low. Attention to images unrelated to circumscribed interests was equivalent in the two groups.ConclusionsThese results suggest that despite autistic individuals holding an intense interest in a particular class of stimuli, there may be a reduced impact of this prior experience and expertise on attentional processing. The implications of this absence of automatic priority are discussed in terms of the behaviors associated with the condition.

Highlights

Autistic individuals commonly show circumscribed or “special” interests: areas of obsessive interest in a specific category
The present study explored the relationship between circumscribed interests and attention and perception in the condition
Response time (RT) increased with set size and participants were slower to respond to incongruent trials, but there was no overall difference in RT between the autistic and non-autistic participants

Summary

Introduction

Autistic individuals commonly show circumscribed or “special” interests: areas of obsessive interest in a specific category. While the severity and symptom profile can vary across individuals, autism is clinically defined by deficits in social communication and interaction, as well as the presence of restricted, repetitive behavior, interests or activities (RRB) [3] The latter comprises aspects such as stereotyped or repetitive movements and speech, insistence on sameness and altered sensory sensitivities. While these symptoms can be as problematic for autistic individuals as the better-known social features of the condition [4], RRBs can manifest themselves as strong passions or specific talents [5,6,7]. Referred to as circumscribed—or special—interests, these passions generally involve an intense level of interest in a narrow topic [8]

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