Abstract
The current study examined how emotional faces impact on attentional control at both involuntary and voluntary levels in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A non-face single target was either presented in isolation or synchronously with emotional face distractors namely angry, happy and neutral faces. ASD and typically developing children made more erroneous saccades towards emotional distractors relative to neutral distractors in parafoveal and peripheral conditions. Remote distractor effects were observed on saccade latency in both groups regardless of distractor type, whereby time taken to initiate an eye movement to the target was longest in central distractor conditions, followed by parafoveal and peripheral distractor conditions. The remote distractor effect was greater for angry faces compared to happy faces in the ASD group. Proportions of failed disengagement trials from central distractors, for the first saccade, were higher in the angry distractor condition compared with the other two distractor conditions in ASD, and this effect was absent for the typical group. Eye movement results suggest difficulties in disengaging from fixated angry faces in ASD. Atypical disengagement from angry faces at the voluntary level could have consequences for the development of higher-level socio-communicative skills in ASD.
Highlights
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition characterized by social and communicative abnormalities and repeated and stereotyped behaviours [1]
A significant interaction by distractor position and distractor type was found, z = -2.43, p = .015, showing that neutral face distractors triggered more errors in the peripheral (M = 0.49, SD = 0.50) location compared to the parafoveal (M = 0.44, SD = 0.50) location, z = -2.02, p =
The current study aimed to utilize the Remote Distractor Paradigm to investigate how both the reflexive and voluntary attentional mechanisms are related to the ability to ignore emotional face distractors in children with and without ASD
Summary
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition characterized by social and communicative abnormalities and repeated and stereotyped behaviours [1]. Individuals with ASD have been shown to have significant deficits in social cognition, for example, this population have poorer performance in recognising facial emotions compared to typically developing (TD) individuals, especially for negative (e.g. angry and fearful) emotions [2,3,4,5]. Impaired social cognition is regarded to be related to atypical attentional processing of social stimuli [6,7,8], as abnormal attention to social cues may impede rapid detection and utilisation. Attentional control for emotional faces in autism
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