International Meeting for Autism Research: An Understanding of Sharing, Following, and Directing Attention and Behaviour in Children with Autism

An Understanding of Sharing, Following, and Directing Attention and Behaviour in Children with Autism

Saturday, May 22, 2010
Franklin Hall B Level 4 (Philadelphia Marriott Downtown)
11:00 AM
J. M. Normand , Department of Psychology, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada
B. D'Entremont , Department of Psychology, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada
Background: Social cognitive development begins early in life when children develop an understanding of others in terms of their intentions (concrete goals or purposes that guide behaviour). An understanding of others as intentional agents is displayed through the functional behaviours of sharing, following, and directing attention and behaviour. Previous cross-sectional research investigating these functional behaviours in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has found that, for both these behaviours, children find sharing easier than following, and following easier than directing (Carpenter, Pennington, & Rogers, 2002).  Furthermore, it appears that the attention functions were more challenging for children with ASD than the behaviour functions.
Objectives: The objective of the present research was to test whether the findings of Carpenter et al. (2002) would generalize to an independent sample with ASD. The present study used tasks which were different from those used by Carpenter et al; however the tasks were designed to measure the same underlying constructs. It was hypothesized that the results would be similar to Carpenter et al.
Methods: Eleven children (10 males) with community diagnosed ASD participated. All children were seen individually for one session. A modified version of the Early Social Communication Scale (ESCS; Mundy, et al. 2003) was used to gather information on sharing attention, following attention, directing attention, and directing behaviour. Three imitation procedures provided assessment of following behaviour. A cross-sectional design was used. Pass/fail criteria were created for each task and group patterns were determined by ordering the tasks by the number of children who passed each task at the time of inquiry. Individual patterns of passing or failing each task were compared to the group to identify how many children fit the group pattern.
Results: An overall group pattern was displayed by 90% of participants. Considering the attention function, more participants passed sharing attention than following attention and more passed following attention than directing attention. For behaviour, more participants passed directing behaviour than following behaviour. Comparing across functions, directing behaviour was found to be easier than sharing, following, or directing attention, while following behaviour was more difficult than all three attention tasks.
Conclusions: As predicted, our sample displayed the same pattern of sharing, following, and directing attention as Carpenter et al. (2002). In contrast to Carpenter et al., more children passed directing behaviour than following behaviour. Carpenter et al. found the opposite pattern. Also, while understanding attention was generally more difficult for our sample than understanding behaviour, at least one following behaviour task posed a significant challenge for our sample. The difference between these two studies could be due to the way directing and following behaviour were measured or to differences in sample characteristics, particularly verbal ability. Importantly, these findings suggest that different pathways to intentional and social understanding may exist for children with ASD depending on their developmental or verbal profiles.
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