Friday, May 18, 2012
Sheraton Hall (Sheraton Centre Toronto)
3:00 PM
S. I. Habayeb1, K. Knoch2, W. Jones3 and A. Klin3, (1)Marcus Autism Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta & Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, (2)Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, (3)Marcus Autism Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta & Emory School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA
Background: In an effort to quantify social visual engagement, previous research in ASD has analyzed visual fixations to regions of interest in scenes of social interaction. While these measures are indicative of differences in social processing between individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and their typically-developing (TD) peers, this method fails to capture dynamic reactions to change in visual content. One such reaction, shifting visual attention, can be thought of as an evolutionarily adaptive process that aids in our navigation of the social world: we re-allocate limited visual resources from one stimulus to another in pursuit of a goal. Past research on shifting visual attention following movie scene cuts provides insight into such processes. Past research found that adolescents and school-age children with ASD shift attention with similar latency as TD peers, but direct their first fixations to different content locations. TD children direct the majority of first fixations towards the eyes, while adolescents with ASD are equally likely to fixate on eyes, mouth, body, or object areas. This study will downward extend this research into 12-24 month old infants.
Objectives: To determine whether 12-24 month old infants with ASD differ from their TD peers in both their reaction times to shift visual attention following a movie scene cut, as well as in their location of first fixation following a scene cut.
Methods: Children with ASD and age- and non-verbal IQ-matched TD controls, between the ages of 12 and 24 months, watched dynamic social scenes of young children playing with their peers. Scene cuts provided instances where new visual information required a viewer to shift attention from an old location (in the previous frame) to a new target location (in the current frame). Eye-tracking technology was used to collect visual scanning and fixation data. Dependent measures included reaction times to shift gaze following a movie scene cut, and location of first fixation within the scene following a cut.
Results: Preliminary results suggest that reaction times to shift visual attention following a change in visual information are similar between-groups. Preliminary results also indicate increased variability in first fixations for 12-24 month-old infants with ASD.
Conclusions: This study explores the extent to which shifting visual attention and first reactions to new visual information may serve as a proxy for “social intuition”—the adaptive reactions that guide where visual resources are optimally allocated when faced with new visual information.
