Visual search and autism symptoms: What young children search for and co-occurring ADHD matter.

Brianna R Doherty,Gaia Scerif,Tony Charman,Teodora Gliga,Mark H Johnson

doi:10.1111/desc.12661

Abstract

Superior visual search is one of the most common findings in the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) literature. Here, we ascertain how generalizable these findings are across task and participant characteristics, in light of recent replication failures. We tested 106 3-year-old children at familial risk for ASD, a sample that presents high ASD and ADHD symptoms, and 25 control participants, in three multi-target search conditions: easy exemplar search (look for cats amongst artefacts), difficult exemplar search (look for dogs amongst chairs/tables perceptually similar to dogs), and categorical search (look for animals amongst artefacts). Performance was related to dimensional measures of ASD and ADHD, in agreement with current research domain criteria (RDoC). We found that ASD symptom severity did not associate with enhanced performance in search, but did associate with poorer categorical search in particular, consistent with literature describing impairments in categorical knowledge in ASD. Furthermore, ASD and ADHD symptoms were both associated with more disorganized search paths across all conditions. Thus, ASD traits do not always convey an advantage in visual search; on the contrary, ASD traits may be associated with difficulties in search depending upon the nature of the stimuli (e.g., exemplar vs. categorical search) and the presence of co-occurring symptoms.

Highlights

Enhanced visual search ability is one of the most consistent findings in the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) literature
Given the evidence for difficulties with making inferences based on category knowledge in ASD, it is possible that difficulties with searching for targets belonging to a superordinate category (e.g., “animals”) as opposed to a basic category (e.g., “a cat”) will be exacerbated in participants with this disorder
ADHD has been linked to poorer visual search with single targets (Mullane & Klein, 2008), as well as more disorganized large-scale search (Rosetti et al, 2016), In the current study, we investigate whether the search superiority conveyed by ASD traits holds when the nature of the target distractor distinction is varied in a multi-target search which requires planning and search organization

Summary

Introduction

Enhanced visual search ability is one of the most consistent findings in the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) literature. Previous research in neurotypical individuals suggests that searching for a superordinate category (“footwear”) as opposed to a basic category (“boots”) proves generally more difficult (Maxfield & Zelinsky, 2012; Schmidt & Zelinsky, 2009). This is probably due to the lack of specificity that helps to guide visual search to realistic, complex objects; the longer time required to verify that the target is a member of the superordinate category; and the tendency to combine instances of a category into a prototype that has little overlap with specific search target exemplars (Hout & Goldinger, 2015; Yang & Zelinsky, 2009; Zhang, Yang, & Samaras, 2006). In most real-life situations search will be guided by both low-level perceptual characteristics of searched-for items (Duncan & Humphreys, 1989; Treisman, 1991), and their higher-level categorical characteristics (Maxfield & Zelinsky, 2012; Schmidt & Zelinsky, 2009), the majority of the visual search literature in ASD to date has used targets and distractors with poor semantic content, as for example by requiring participants to find a target “o” amongst “x” distractors

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion