The Role of Learning in Visual Endogenous Orienting

Background:

Children with autism have difficulties strategically directing their visual attention, exhibiting unusual looking behaviour when interacting with both people and objects. On laboratory experiments in which symbols, such as an arrow, are used as cues to direct attention, persons with autism require more time to make a response, though this is not affected by how much time is available to see the cue, or how fast children can press buttons to make responses.

Objectives:

The purpose of this project is to examine the ability of children with autism to use symbolic cues to guide visual attention. Two experiments were designed to examine the role of learning the cue-target relationship in visual orienting performance. In the first experiment, children with and without autism complete visual orienting tasks with cues that range from non-symbolic to arbitrary, where the cue-target association must be learned within the confines of the task. In the second experiment, children with and without autism complete a visual sequential learning task with increasing cues to aid performance.

Methods:

Data collection will begin in January; participants will include 20 children with and without autism ages 8-12. Experiment 1 examines learning in visual orienting tasks under conditions that vary in both type of representation and predictability of the cue. Children perform three computerised orienting tasks, with non-symbolic (peripheral flash), directional symbolic (central arrow) and arbitrary symbolic (central colour) cues. Targets appear on the left or right side of a computer screen in blocks of non-predictive (25% correctly cued) and predictive (75% correctly cued) conditions. Experiment 2 examines learning simple sequences in visual orienting under three different cuing conditions: no cue, implicit cue, and explicit cue. In the first task, targets appear one at a time in a quadrant of the computer screen in blocks of random sequence, clockwise sequence, and counter-clockwise sequence (No-Cuing). In the second task, the targets for each type of sequence appear on a different coloured background (Implicit Cuing). In the third task, children are told in advance which sequence occurs with each of the different coloured-backgrounds (Explicit Cuing).

Results:

The hypotheses of Experiment 1 are that children with autism will exhibit weaker orienting effects on the directional and arbitrary cue conditions, but intact performance on the non-symbolic cue condition, and that children with autism will be less affected by the manipulation of predictability than matched typically developing children. The hypotheses of Experiment 2 are that children with autism will display a different learning curve than matched typically developing children, and that this difference will be most pronounced on the Implicit Cuing condition.

Conclusions:

If these hypotheses are supported, this will suggest that difficulties exhibited by children with autism on visual orienting are a function of difficulty learning the relationship between the cue and target.