Objectives: We employed the “change blindness” paradigm to compare how the presence, absence, or specific context of different types of social cues in a scene affect TD children, children with ASD, and typical adults in visually identifying changes in a pair of scenes. We hypothesized that i) Children with ASD would find it more difficult than TD children to discover changes in the scene that are related to social cues; ii) If social cues in the scene are unrelated to the target change or serve to direct attention away from it, children with ASD would discover the change more readily than TD children, whose attention would be misdirected by the social cues; iii) Because social cues continue to develop past early childhood, typical young adults would perform better on the change detection task than children with or without ASD.
Methods: Forty adults and forty children participated; 22 were high-functioning (IQ = 98 ± 4) children with ASD (autism: 12, Asperger’s: 4, PDD-NOS: 6; 10.5 ± 0.5 years). The remaining 18 were TD children (10.8 ± 0.6 years; IQ = 107 ± 6). Change trials were categorized into one of six conditions, depending on the presence/absence and nature of the social cues in the scene. On different conditions, the change was in an actor’s facial expression or gaze, an object that an actor overtly pointed to or gazed at, an object connected with an actor in the scene, an object unconnected with any actors in the scene, an object while an actor pointed to a different, unchanging object, or an object in a scene containing no actors. Percent correct, response time, and inverse efficiency were measures of performance.
Results: No significant differences were observed on any performance measure between children with and without autism on any of the six conditions. Children (with and/or without autism) were worse than adults in identifying change while an actor pointed to an unchanging object, or change in an object, whether or not it was connected with an actor in the scene, but no worse when no actors were present in the scene, i.e. when there was no social cueing, or when an actor in the scene pointed to the change.
Conclusions: Children with autism use relevant social cues while searching a scene just as typical children do. Compared with adults, children with and without autism are over-reliant on social referencing cues in the scene, and are less able to disengage from them and use other kinds of cues. Social cues “capture” the child’s attention.