An New Intervention To Increase Visual Social Attention In Autism Children By Using Attention Bias Training

It has been proved that the autism children lack of attention preference for social stimuli, such as face. Some researchers suggested that this may be one of the reasons why autism children experience social difficulties. Children with typical development show more attention to people or face in their early life, and this attention bias can help them oabtain more social information, consequently learn to master their social skills. Based on these facts, we suggested that helping autism children learn to pay more attention to the social stimuli may help them improve their social skills and other related social development. In addition, attention bias modified traning (ABMT) has been confirmed as a good way to help people direct their attention to certain stimuli. In our study, we used ABMT as our training task. In this task, we showed subjects face and object stimuli side by side simultaneously, tried to direct autism children’s attention from object ot face, and record eye-tracking data to check the training effect. The results showed that in the static situation, the training is effective, which means children pay more attention to the face rather than other places after the training. However, in the dymatic situation, the training effect is not as good as in static situation The difference between training stimuli and the assessment stimuli may be the reason for the non-siginificant training effect. How to generalized the training effect in the static situation into a more natural scene can be studied in the future.