That looks familiar: attention allocation to familiar and unfamiliar faces in children with autism spectrum disorder

Gillespie‐Smith, Karri; Doherty‐Sneddon, Gwyneth; Hancock, Peter; Riby, Deborah M.

doi:10.1080/13546805.2014.943365

Cited by 14 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 45 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thus, it is unlikely that familiarization alone could account for the clear differences observed between groups. It is possible that inclusion of familiar social images (e.g., faces of family members) may have elicited enhanced social attention in participants with ASD, although this has not been observed in previous studies (Dalton et al, 2005; Sterling et al, 2008; Gillespie-Smith et al, 2014). Likewise, it is important to note that our HAI stimuli were also not individualized to be the most salient or familiar object for each ASD participant in relation to his or her own idiosyncratic circumscribed interest.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Social Orienting and Attention Is Influenced by the Presence of Competing Nonsocial Information in Adolescents with Autism

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background: Our experiences with the world play a critical role in neural and behavioral development. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) spend a disproportionate amount of time seeking out, attending to, and engaging with aspects of their environment that are largely nonsocial in nature. In this study we adapted an established method for eliciting and quantifying aspects of visual choice behavior related to preference to test the hypothesis that preference for nonsocial sources of stimulation diminishes orientation and attention to social sources of stimulation in children with ASD.Method: Preferential viewing tasks can serve as objective measures of preference, with a greater proportion of viewing time to one item indicative of increased preference. The current task used gaze-tracking technology to examine patterns of visual orientation and attention to stimulus pairs that varied in social (faces) and nonsocial content (high autism interest or low autism interest). Participants included both adolescents diagnosed with ASD and typically developing; groups were matched on IQ and gender.Results: Repeated measures ANOVA revealed that individuals with ASD had a significantly greater latency to first fixate on social images when this image was paired with a high autism interest image, compared to a low autism interest image pairing. Participants with ASD showed greater total look time to objects, while typically developing participants preferred to look at faces. Groups also differed in number and average duration of fixations to social and object images. In the ASD group only, a measure of nonsocial interest was associated with reduced preference for social images when paired with high autism interest images.Conclusions: In ASD, the presence of nonsocial sources of stimulation can significantly increase the latency of look time to social sources of information. These results suggest that atypicalities in social motivation in ASD may be context-dependent, with a greater degree of plasticity than is assumed by existing social motivation accounts of ASD.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Social Orienting and Attention Is Influenced by the Presence of Competing Nonsocial Information in Adolescents with Autism

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Although participants gained some familiarity with test faces due to their repeated presentation within the testing session, the identities were unknown to them at the outset of the study. This is important to note, as past work (albeit with children) suggests that severity of social autistic traits is related to atypical deployment of social attention when viewing unfamiliar (but not familiar) faces [Gillespie‐Smith, Doherty‐Sneddon, Hancock, & Riby, ]. This may contribute to impaired learning of facial identity, which has been described in adults with ASD [e.g., Ipser, Ring, Murphy, Gaigg, & Cook, ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 91%

Empathy and face processing in adults with and without autism spectrum disorder

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Our findings suggest that people with ASD have problems processing expressive faces, especially when seen in motion. It is important to learn who is most at risk for face processing problems, given that in the general population such problems appear to be linked to impaired social skills and empathy. By studying relationships between different abilities and traits, we may be able to find better ways to diagnose and support all people on the autism spectrum.

show abstract

“…However when scenes are simpler, more cartoon like or more relevant to the child with ASD no difference is observed (van der Geest, Kemner, Camferrman, Verbaten and van Engeland, 2002;Boraston and Blakemore, 2007;Gillespie-Smith, Riby, Hancock and Doherty-Sneddon, 2014). Additionally when considering simple attention towards either a person or object Fletcher-Watson, Leekam, Benson, Frank and Findlay (2009) found no difference between individuals with ASD and a TD comparison group.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attentional allocation of autism spectrum disorder individuals: Searching for a Face-in-the-Crowd

Moore

Reidy

Heavey

2015

Autism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A study is reported which tests the proposition that faces capture the attention of those with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) less than a typical population. A visual search task based on the Face-in-the-Crowd paradigm was used to examine the attentional allocation of ASD adults for faces. Participants were required to search for discrepant target images from within 9-image arrays. Both participants with ASD and control participants demonstrated speeded identification of faces compared to non-face objects. This indicates that when attention is under conscious control both ASD and TD comparison adults show an attentional bias for faces, which contrasts with previous research which found an absence of an attentional bias for faces in ASD. Theoretical implications of this differentiation are discussed.

show abstract

That looks familiar: attention allocation to familiar and unfamiliar faces in children with autism spectrum disorder

Cited by 14 publications

References 45 publications

Social Orienting and Attention Is Influenced by the Presence of Competing Nonsocial Information in Adolescents with Autism

Social Orienting and Attention Is Influenced by the Presence of Competing Nonsocial Information in Adolescents with Autism

Empathy and face processing in adults with and without autism spectrum disorder

Attentional allocation of autism spectrum disorder individuals: Searching for a Face-in-the-Crowd

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About