Autistic Children’s Visual Attention To Circumscribed Interests:Evidence From Eye-Tracking Study

The social interaction deficit is one of the primary features of autism, they have defect in processing social attention cues and this further hinder the acquisition of social skills. However, the autism show circumscribed interests to specific types of nonsocial stimulus. They collect a large amount of information about circumscribed interests and systemize it, they spend more time on them. Study the mode of autistic visual attention to circumscribed interests enables us to figure out the defect of autistic visual attention, hence we can provide theoretical foundation to train autistic visual attention. Using eye-tracking skill, we investigate autistic visual attention shift and disengagement to circumscribed interests. Meanwhile, we test two autistic visual attention deficit hypotheses.Experiment 1 investigated whether autism had circumscribed interests and the mode of fixating stimulus through presenting a picture which contained circumscribed interests, non- circumscribed interests and social stimulus. The result showed that the TFF (time to first fixation) to circumscribed interests of autism was faster than other two stimulus. There were no significant difference on the visual attention to circumscribed interests between two groups, but the autism performed worse on social stimuli than the control significantly.Experiment 2 involved two studies. Those two studies inspected the visual attention shift and disengagement to different stimulus in two groups using gap-overlap paradigm, we also verify two hypotheses about autistic visual attention deficit. The results indicated that the visual attention shift and disengagement to circumscribed interests were faster than other two stimulus, the total fixation duration and fixation counts of the circumscribed interests were higher than the other two. The visual attention shift and disengagement of the autism were worse than the control significantly with the attention disengagement rather worse. The attention disengagement deficit hypothesis could explain the visual attention flaw of the autism more powerfully.