Alteration of Attentional Blink in High Functioning Autism: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Autism is characterized by deficits in attention. However, no study has investigated the dynamics of attentional processes in autistic patients yet. The attentional blink (AB) paradigm provides information about the temporal dynamics of attention in particular about the allocation and the duration of an attentional episode. We compared 11 high functioning autistic patients with 15 control participants on a classical AB task. Autistic patients exhibited a deficit in rapidly allocated attentional resources. Further investigations such as coupling AB evaluation with neuroimaging data and/or increasing the size of groups, would allow for investigating the neurobiological substrates of these AB alterations in autistic patients.

Modulation of attentional blink with emotional faces in typical development and in autism spectrum disorders

“…Thus, early visual attention to stimuli without emotional valence, regardless of stimulus type, appears to be similar in ASD and TD groups. The present findings conflict with one study showing that adults with ASD had reduced Target2 accuracy for longer lags relative to controls (Amirault et al, 2009); however this finding was not observed in other studies (Corden et al, 2008; Gaigg & Bowler, 2009; Rinehart et al, 2010). One critical difference between Amirault et al and the other studies reporting no group differences is that T2 (black “X”) and distracters (black letters) did not differ in color in their study.…”

“…First, our study is the first to examine the AB effect for social pictorial stimuli such as photographs of faces. Second, our finding of an intact AB effect for stimuli with neutral emotional valence in ASD extends past findings using stimuli such as single letters in children and adults (Amirault et al, 2009; Rinehart, Tonge, Brereton, & Bradshaw, 2010) and words with adults (Corden et al, 2008; Gaigg & Bowler, 2009). Thus, early visual attention to stimuli without emotional valence, regardless of stimulus type, appears to be similar in ASD and TD groups.…”

Threatening faces fail to guide attention for adults with autistic‐like traits

“…To date, evidence suggests that a similar AB occurs across both ASD and neurotypical individuals when neutral target stimuli are presented in the AB [Amirault et al, ; Rinehart, Tonge, Brereton, & Bradshaw, ]. From this we can infer that the general attentional mechanisms responsible for processing rapid sensory inputs are comparable between the two groups.…”

Multiple Object Tracking in Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…In particular, several lines of work have implicated temporal aspects of attention in ASD by showing that people with ASD have difficulty adjusting the size of attentional focus dynamically (Mann and Walker 2003; Rinehart et al 2001) and difficulty switching the locus of their attention (Elsabbagh et al 2009; Facoetti et al 2008; Ibanez et al 2008; Kikuchi et al 2011; Landry and Bryson 2004; van der Geest et al 2001), especially in paradigms that include either dynamic, repetitive stimuli or social stimuli. Further, people with ASD may show reductions in the temporal resolution of attention, as evidenced by a greater attentional blink effect (Amirault et al 2009) though see (Rinehart et al 2010) and reduced abilities in temporal integration in visual (Nakano et al 2010; Brock et al 2002), auditory (Groen et al 2009) and multimodal (Foss-Feig et al 2010; Kwakye et al 2011) tasks. These findings suggest that dynamic or spatiotemporal attention may be impaired in ASD.…”