Lateral glances toward moving stimuli among young children with autism: Early regulation of locally oriented perception?

Abstract

Autistic adults display enhanced and locally oriented low-level perception of static visual information, but diminished perception of some types of movement. The identification of potential precursors, such as atypical perceptual processing, among very young children would be an initial step toward understanding the development of these phenomena. The purpose of this study was to provide an initial measure and interpretation of atypical visual exploratory behaviors toward inanimate objects (AVEBIOs) among young children with autism. A coding system for AVEBIOs was constructed from a corpus of 40 semistandardized assessments of autistic children. The most frequent atypical visual behavior among 15 children aged 33-73 months was lateral glance that was mostly oriented toward moving stimuli and was detected reliably by the experimenters (intraclass correlation > .90). This behavior was more common among autistic than typically developing children of similar verbal mental age and chronological age. As lateral vision is associated with the filtering of high spatial frequency (detail perception) information and the facilitation of high temporal frequencies (movement perception), its high prevalence among very young autistic children may reflect early attempts to regulate and/or optimize both excessive amounts of local information and diminished perception of movement. These findings are initial evidence for the need to consider the neural bases and development of atypical behaviors and their implications for intervention strategies.

Children with autism demonstrate circumscribed attention during passive viewing of complex social and nonsocial picture arrays

“…This finding suggests that ASD children may be more likely than TYP children to fixate on multiple parts of an object image, consistent with previous studies demonstrating that children and adults with autism demonstrate a bias toward detail-oriented processing [Happe and Frith, 2006]. Moreover, because this pattern appears restricted to HAI images, items of circumscribed interest may disproportionately elicit a detail-oriented attentional style in children with ASD [Mottron and Belleville, 1993;Mottron et al, 1999Mottron et al, , 2007. Future studies are needed to determine whether this attentional style is elicited more because of the content of HAI images or because of their greater perceptual complexity.…”

Measuring gaze of children with autism spectrum disorders in naturalistic interactions

“…We are currently analyzing our data to evaluate to what extent lateral gaze is specifically used when the gaze is directed to the face of the experimenter. In contrast to [7], which reports only instances of extreme lateral gaze, our results seem to indicate the use of eccentric viewing as a continuous strategy across the whole field of view. Indeed, lateral glances correspond to when the gaze is directed to the extremes of the field of view.…”

“…experimenter, windows); a hypersensitivity to these stimuli would explain a downcast gaze. This hypothesis is supported by the theory of Enhanced Perceptual Functioning (EPF) [14] which suggests that ASD children are overly sensitive to high frequency visual signals and proposes the use of an eccentric viewing strategy as a way to filter these signals [7]. Our findings in terms of exploration of the lateral field of view are consistent with this idea.…”

“…A symptom commonly associated with ASD is the phenomenon of downcast gaze [6]. In a study of children with ASD playing and exploring objects, [7] reported an unusual amount of lateral glances, or instances of gaze directed to the extreme of the lateral (horizontal) field of view. These observation have been linked to accounts of hypo-and hyper-sensitivity to visual stimuli, and suggest the use of these atypical visual behavior as compensating strategies [7].…”

“…The latter requires an extremely long analysis time, as multiple raters have to manually assess the behavior of the child to ensure reliable results (e.g. [7]). However, naturalistic interactions can elicit more natural behaviors from the child [9], [8], and can therefore provide a better insight on the usual behavior of individuals with autism.…”