Joint Attention and Information Processing in Higher Functioning ASD

Background: Research indicate the experience of initiating joint attention deepen stimulus encoding to a greater extent than the experience of following the attention of others (Bayless et al. 2013; Boothby et al. 2014; Kim & Mundy, 2012).  Theory also suggests that children with ASD may not display the typical pattern of cognitive benefits from the experience of joint attention (Mundy & Kim, 2010).

Objectives: The goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that the experience of initiating joint attention would have different impact on the visual stimulus encoding of higher functioning children with ASD (HFASD) than typical peers or children with other clinical conditions, such as ADHD.

 Methods: Thirty-two 9 to 13 year-olds with HFASD (IQ = 105, SD = 14.9) and age and IQ matched samples of 27 children with ADHD (IQ = 101, SD = 15.1) and 23 children with typical development (TD, IQ = 112, SD = 14.1) were presented with a virtual reality paradigm developed by Kim & Mundy (2012).  They studied pictures in one condition where an avatar followed their attention to the pictures (IJA analogue). In another condition children followed the gaze of the avatar to pictures on study trials (RJA analogue). The dependent measure was the number of pictures correctly recognized in conjunction with each condition corrected for rates of false positive recognition.  ASD symptom presentation was confirmed with parent report on the Social Communication Questionnaire (Means = 21, 4.9, 2.3 for the ASD, ADHD, & TD groups) and the Autism Spectrum Symptom Questionnaire (Means = 18, 7.5, 1.8 respectively). ADHD symptoms were confirmed with parent report on the Conner-3.

Results:  A mixed ANOVA with IQ as a covariate revealed a significant groups by condition interaction, F (2, 82) = 6.25, p < .003, eta² = .13. Children in the comparison groups displayed significantly better picture recognition in the IJA rather than RJA condition. There was no evidence of this effect in the ASD group (See Fig. 1). The ASD group displayed worse recognition memory in the IJA condition than the other two groups (p < .01), but there was no evidence of recognition memory differences in the RJA condition (See Fig, 1). IQ was positively correlated with IJA recognition (r = .37, p < .03) in the ASD group but RJA recognition (r = .05) was not. The former was significant different than the respective correlations in the ADHD (r = -.11) and TD samples (r = .16), F (1.82) = 4.67, p < .03. 

Conclusions: These results are consistent with research adults but indicate that children also display information processing benefits from the experience of IJA. However, children with HFASD do not display this benefit. Joint attention disturbance may be difficult to observe in children with HFASD, but may be evident in the information processing benefits related to joint attention. Also, ASD children with higher IQs are more likely to experience IJA information processing benefits, or ASD children who experience these benefits are more likely to have higher IQs.