Eye Movement Difficulties in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Implications for Implicit Contextual Learning

Abstract

It is widely accepted that we use contextual information to guide our gaze when searching for an object. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) also utilise contextual information in this way; yet, their visual search in tasks of this kind is much slower compared with people without ASD. The aim of the current study was to explore the reason for this by measuring eye movements. Eye movement analyses revealed that the slowing of visual search was not caused by making a greater number of fixations. Instead, participants in the ASD group were slower to launch their first saccade, and the duration of their fixations was longer. These results indicate that slowed search in ASD in contextual learning tasks is not due to differences in the spatial allocation of attention but due to temporal delays in the initial-reflexive orienting of attention and subsequent-focused attention. These results have broader implications for understanding the unusual attention profile of individuals with ASD and how their attention may be shaped by learning.

Brief Report: Patterns of Eye Movements in Face to Face Conversation are Associated with Autistic Traits: Evidence from a Student Sample

“…In support of this, Goldberg et al (2002) However, heightened visual search ability has not been unanimously demonstrated. In tasks where target and distracter objects are similar and participants are able to make use of context, individuals with autism exhibit slower search performance (Barnes et al, 2008;Brown et al, 2010;Kourkoulou et al, 2013). Longer search time in such tasks was found to be driven by longer duration of fixations (Kourkoulou et al, 2013).…”

“…In tasks where target and distracter objects are similar and participants are able to make use of context, individuals with autism exhibit slower search performance (Barnes et al, 2008;Brown et al, 2010;Kourkoulou et al, 2013). Longer search time in such tasks was found to be driven by longer duration of fixations (Kourkoulou et al, 2013). It therefore seems that overall individuals with autism tend to exhibit reduced saccadic activity when task demands are high.…”

“…In visual search tasks, poorer performance by those with ASD was associated with longer fixation durations in tasks where distracters were similar to targets (e.g. Kourkoulou et al, 2013). Lower saccade frequency in those with ASD was also evident when viewing novel, but not with frequently occurring, visual stimuli (Kemner et al, 1998).…”

Implicit learning in individuals with autism spectrum disorders: a meta-analysis

“…After a first screening step, 29 studies were retrieved. We found five studies using the SRT task (Mostofsky et al 2000;Gordon & Stark, 2007;Brown et al 2010;Travers et al 2010), two studies using the ASRT task (Barnes et al 2008;Nemeth et al 2010), two studies using the PR task (Gidley Larson & Mostofsky, 2008;Limoges et al 2013) and five studies using the CC task (Barnes et al 2008;Brown et al 2010;Kourkoulou et al 2012Kourkoulou et al , 2013Travers et al 2013). Three more studies were found screening the references Gordon & Stark, 2007;Limoges et al 2013).…”

Reading comprehension intervention for high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorders

“…Normally, skilled readers are able to determine the meanings of most unfamiliar words as they read by exploiting the contextual cues embedded within the text and by utilising their own world knowledge to fill in the information gaps (Kourkoulou et al, 2013;leekam, 2007). However, due to the overload of information in working memory, learners with ASD experience more difficulty integrating context cues to construct word meanings because they are unable to adequately attend to the semantic content during the decoding process (Henderson et al, 2011).…”