This study assessed the effectiveness of an attention intervention program (Computerized Progressive Attentional Training; CPAT) in improving academic performance of children with ASD. Fifteen 6-10 year olds with ASD attending a mainstream and a special school were assigned to an experimental (CPAT; n = 8) and active control (computer games; n = 7) group. Children were assessed pre- and post-intervention on measures of behavioural symptoms, cognitive skills and academic performance. The intervention was conducted in school twice a week for 8 weeks. Children in the CPAT group showed cognitive and academic improvements over and above the active control group, while children in both groups showed improvements in behaviour. Results suggest that attention training is a feasible approach to improving academic performance in this population.

Our capacity to attend a target while ignoring irrelevant distraction impacts our ability to successfully interact with our environment. Previous reports have sometimes identified excessive distractor interference in both autism and schizophrenia spectrum disorders and in neurotypical individuals with high subclinical expressions of these conditions. Independent of task, we show that the direction of the effect of autism or psychosis traits on the suppression or rejection of a non-target item is diametrical. In Study 1, in which the presence of a salient non-target item hindered performance, higher autism traits were associated with better performance, while higher psychosis traits were associated with worse performance. In Study 2, in which the presence of a salient non-target item facilitated performance, a complete reversal of effects was observed. Future clinical interventions may be informed by the context-specific advantages we observed for the autism and psychosis spectra, and by the need to consider the diametric effects they yield.

The ability to inhibit distracting information-distractor suppression-is a fundamental process for the visual and motor systems. Whereas aging is typically linked to a general decline in cognitive processing, a specific impairment in distractor suppression is found during visual attention tasks. Despite this, the effect of aging on a human's capacity to inhibit distracting information during a motor task is currently unknown. Therefore, we tested the ability of young and older adults to inhibit distracting information during a visual attention (global-local) and a motor (reaching) task. When faced with distractors, younger and older adults displayed significant behavioral impairments (accuracy and speed) across both tasks. However, these deficits were substantially enhanced in older adults. Intriguingly, the amount of distractor impairment observed within each participant was correlated across the visual and motor tasks, irrespective of age group. Thus, while all participants' ability to inhibit distractors was correlated across the visual and motor domain, older adults displayed a generalized distractor inhibition deficit. We propose that a shift from proactive to reactive control in older adults could explain such impairment. These results may have important implications regarding the ability of older adults to effectively deal with distractors during complex visuomotor tasks such as driving.

Attention atypicality is evident in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its broader phenotype with previous studies suggesting that in some cases participants can be more efficient at ignoring distracting irrelevant information. However, it is not clear to what extent this improved filtering capacity is driven by perceptual atypicality, such as local bias or atypical face processing, which is also sometimes reported in these populations. For instance, better ability to ignore the global aspect of a display could stem from a local perceptual bias rather than from improved distractor inhibition. To test whether distractor suppression per se, is associated with high expression of autistic traits, in the present study a large cohort of neurotypical participants (n = 218), in whom expression of autistic traits was assessed, performed two nonspatial attention selection tasks with different categories of stimuli (global/local and face/scene). Importantly, both tasks involved a conflict with one aspect of the stimuli designated as the target and the other designated as the distractor. Across the two experiments adults with high autistic traits were overall, better able to ignore distractors than adults with low autistic traits, irrespective of the type of perceptual processing involved. These results support the notion that autistic tendencies are associated with increased attention filtering (at least when target and distractor remain constant) which is not dependent on perceptual biases. Thus, future work in the broader autism phenotype should explicitly consider the effect played by attention mechanisms in this population. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1345–1355. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary In the present study, we show that neurotypical adults with high autistic traits are better able to avoid distraction from conspicuous (but completely irrelevant) distractors when told in advance to do so. This ability is not affected by the type of visual input (for instance, whether the distractor is a face or whether small rather than large letters should be reported). This finding could be important in better understanding the way attention is utilized in Autism.

Although attentional differences are not core symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), attentional atypicalities are often found amongst children and adults with ASD, and even linked to the development of ASD symptoms. In this theoretical paper, early attentional differences seen in ASD such as attention disengagement will be discussed. Further perceptual differences are also revised, concerning atypical attention allocation and perception of faces and social stimuli, and the processing of global and local features. The theory of executive function in ASD is briefly revised, contrasting to evidence of enhanced performance in visuospatial tasks, bringing a new theoretical framework (Dual Mechanism of Control theory) to explain discrepancies in performance in ASD and the Broader Autism Phenotype. Finally, the concept of attentional training in ASD is also suggested as a viable intervention to bring generalized improvements to children with ASD.