Friday, May 18, 2012
Sheraton Hall (Sheraton Centre Toronto)
2:00 PM
E. Birmingham1, K. Johnston2, T. Foulsham3, B. Larryant4, A. Stemer2, A. Kingstone5 and G. Iarocci2, (1)Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada, (2)Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada, (3)Psychology, University of Essex, Essex, United Kingdom, (4)Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, (5)Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Background: A core characteristic of autism is reduced
social attention, specifically reduced “Response to Joint Attention (RJA)” or “gaze following” (Leekam et al.,
J. Child Psych. & Psychi. 1998; Mundy
Devel. and Psychopath. 1995). Studies of gaze following have included semi-naturalistic interactions with infants and young children (where an experimenter sits in front of child, initiates eye contact, and turns his/her head to an object in the room) or computer-based studies (where an image of a face with averted gaze is presented at the center of the screen). Findings from these studies are mixed: some studies have revealed reduced or abnormal gaze following in individuals with autism (e.g., Dawson et al.,
JADD 1998) while others have not (e.g., Chawarska et al.,
Child Dev. 2003). Although the reason for this inconsistency is unclear, a common characteristic of gaze following paradigms is that the gaze cue is
pre-selected for the participant, which may lead participants with autism to attend to the cue in a way that is artificial and not representative of how they would respond in a more natural environment (Birmingham et al., in press). There is a paucity of research in which the gaze cue is not pre-selected for the individual (i.e., research in which the individual is free to
select gaze as an important stimulus). Given the evidence showing reduced orienting to social stimuli in autism (Dawson et al.,
JADD 1998), it is critical to examine
spontaneous gaze following within naturalistic social situations.
Objectives: Here we present a preliminary study on spontaneous following within a naturalistic social interaction. In this novel paradigm, participants play an interactive game with an experimenter, who pseudo-randomly delivers task-irrelevant head turns when the child is not attending to the experimenter. Using a portable eye tracker, we are examining participants’ allocation of attention, both to the experimenter’s gaze (gaze selection) and in response to the experimenter’s gaze (gaze following).
Methods: Data collection for this project is in progress, however, data from 21 participants has been collected. Children and adolescents with high functioning autism (i.e., IQ >85 as measured by the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale; Roid, 2003) between the ages of 8 and 15, will be matched to a sample of typically developing (TD) controls. Eye tracking measures and video observations of social attention will be correlated with scores on the Social Responsiveness Scale (Constantino & Gruber, WPS 2005), to explore relationships between social attention and parent ratings of social functioning.
Results: We expect that individuals with autism will show reduced gaze selection and reduced or delayed gaze following relative to TD individuals. In addition, we expect that other, more qualitative characteristics of shared attention, such as integration with facial expression and social responses, will be different in participants with autism.
Conclusions: This study will provide a novel analysis of gaze selection and following in a naturalistic setting. The findings may have important implications for the design of effective intervention strategies and for our theoretical understanding of the development of social cognition among children with autism.
