Abstract
Impaired cognitive flexibility in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been reported in previous literature. The present study explored ASD children's visual scanning patterns during the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task using eye-tracking technique. ASD and typical developing (TD) children completed the standardized DCCS procedure on the computer while their eye movements were tracked. Behavioral results confirmed previous findings on ASD children's deficits in executive function. ASD children's visual scanning patterns also showed some specific underlying processes in the DCCS task compared to TD children. For example, ASD children looked shorter at the correct card in the postswitch phase and spent longer time at blank areas than TD children did. ASD children did not show a bias to the color dimension as TD children did. The correlations between the behavioral performance and eye moments were also discussed.
Highlights
Executive dysfunction has been well studied and consistently found in previous studies in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) [1,2,3]
Results showed that typical developing (TD) children (M = 2.06, SD = 0.81) got significantly higher Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) scores than ASD children (M = 1.50, SD = 0.79), t(48) = −2.37, P = .022, η2 =
The behavioral performance of ASD children in the DCCS task was significantly poorer than TD children, which was consistent with previous findings on Executive function (EF) deficits in ASD children using behavioral measurements, the DCCS task (e.g., [9, 11, 12, 39])
Summary
Executive dysfunction has been well studied and consistently found in previous studies in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) [1,2,3]. Impaired EF has been found in ASD children in numerous previous studies, including the impaired planning skills in the Tower of Hanoi or the Tower of London task [13,14,15,16,17], the impaired visual spatial working memory [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28] and verbal working memory [23, 29], the impaired inhibitory control in the Stroop task [20, 30, 31], and the deficit in cognitive flexibility in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) [13, 32]. Contradictory findings came from studies that did not find EF deficits in ASD, for example, in the working memory task [30] and in the WCST [31].
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