24152
Visual Search Cancellation and Autism Symptoms: What Young Children Search for and Co-Occurring ADHD Matter
Objectives: This study sought to investigate cancellation performance in 36-month-olds at high and low familial risk for autism, as well as associations with ASD and ADHD symptoms.
Methods: One-hundred and thirty-one 36-month-olds at high (n = 106) and low (n = 25) familial risk for ASD participated in the visual search cancellation task on a touchscreen monitor as a part of a battery of cognitive tasks. In this task, children were asked to search for and touch a) cats among inanimate objects (baseline, “exemplar search”), b) animals amongst inanimate objects (to test categorization, such that higher autistic symptoms were hypothesized to relate to worse performance, “conceptual search”), and c) dogs amongst furniture (to test for the ability to discriminate between perceptually similar objects, such that higher autistic symptoms were hypothesized to relate to better performance, “perceptual search”). The Autism Diagnostic Observation Scale (ADOS) was used to assess severity of autism symptoms and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) was used to assess ADHD symptoms.
Results: While controlling for motor and language abilities, we found that ASD symptom severity did not associate with general enhanced performance in search, but did associate with poorer categorical search in particular, consistent with literature describing impairments in categorical knowledge in ASD. Furthermore, ASD and ADHD symptoms were both independently associated with more disorganized search paths across all conditions
Conclusions: ASD traits therefore do not always convey an advantage in visual search—this depends upon the nature of the stimuli (e.g., exemplar vs. categorical) and the presence of co-occurring ADHD symptoms.