A Point of Departure in the Comparison of Social and Nonsocial Visual Orienting among Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background: Attentional differences among persons with ASDs are apparent in orienting, which is defined as the simple shifting of attentional focus in response to information in the environment. It is unclear whether these differences point to a global orienting difficulty or to a social orienting impairment as differences are noted in response to social and nonsocial information and since direct comparisons of social and nonsocial orienting are rare and vary in methodologies. Objectives: To compare social and nonsocial visual orienting at two SOA levels among children with ASDs and typically developing children matched on nonverbal MA at 8.5 years. Methods: A Posner-like task was used to avoid cross-modality task demands and to equate the stimuli on visual complexity as these factors may have influenced earlier findings of a social orienting impairment among persons with ASDs. Participants were asked to detect social (face) and nonsocial (mixed face) targets on the basis of social (hand point) and nonsocial (arrow) cues that could appear to the right or left of a central fixation point, under SOA conditions of 175 ms and 650 ms. RTs and error rates were the dependent measures, and the “orienting effect” was the index of the utility of the cues. Results: The typically developing children and the children with ASDs displayed strong orienting effects that were indicative of similar orienting abilities. The 650 ms SOA was facilitative for both groups. Group differences emerged in the interaction of cue type and SOA where both groups demonstrated social orienting, but the children with ASDs only did so at the SOA of 650 ms. Conclusions: The findings from this study do not support a general notion of social orienting impairment among children with ASDs, but rather, suggest that social orienting abilities may be contingent upon processing time for this group.