Abstract
In the visual search task, it is well known that detection of a tilted straight line as the target among vertical lines that act as distractors is easier than vice versa, and that detection of a snake image as the target among flower images is easier than vice versa. In this study, the degree of such search asymmetry was compared between 18 children with autism and 14 typically developing (TD) children. The results revealed that compared to TD children, children with autism were disproportionally slow when asked to detect the flower among the snake images, suggesting the possibility that they experienced difficulty of disengaging their attention from the snake images. This delayed disengagement would serve itself as an enhanced attentional bias toward snakes in children with autism that is similar to characteristics of visual search performance in anxiety patients.
Highlights
Particular characteristics of childhood autism involve a profound impairment of communication (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
When the collected data were analyzed by a 2 × 2 repeated measure of analysis of variance, the main effect was statistically significant for TARGET [F(1,30) = 54.275, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.644], but not for CHILD [F(1,30) = 2.781, p = 0.106, η2p = 0.085]
The mean reaction times (RTs) (SDs) for the group of children with autism and for the control group were 1326.32 (218.36) ms and 1314.179 (247.411) ms, respectively, when they responded to a snake target, and 1961.606 (497.283) ms and 1613.036 (352.485) ms, respectively, when they responded to a flower target
Summary
Particular characteristics of childhood autism involve a profound impairment of communication (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). These seemingly conflicting phenomena regarding the characteristics of attention impairment in autism have been interpreted as consequences of excessive on-going processing and excessive attention to endogenous domains where attention is fed back onto oneself; as a result of this internal hyper-focus, it would be more difficult for another person to command the attention of the child with autism, and it would be more difficult for the child himself/herself to command his/her own attention voluntarily (Posner and Dehaene, 1994) This explanation is confirmed by findings about the impairment in disengaging and shifting attention in children with autism (Hughes and Russell, 1993; Van Der Geest et al, 2001; Landry and Bryson, 2004; Elsabbagh et al, 2009), who on the other hand have been reported to behave comparably to typically developing (TD) children with respect to visual orienting performance per se. Snake fear and autism experiments, all conditions were tested separately over a total of four blocks (each of four different types of images as a target) by requiring participants to touch the target image presented on a touch-pad
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