Study On The Visual Attention Characteristics Of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder In Cartoon And Real Social Situations

There are more than 2 million autistic children under 14 years of age in China.Faced with the high incidence of the population,there is no effective medicine in the medical community to treat the two major symptoms of autism.These two major symptoms refer to social communication and social interaction barriers and repeated behaviors.Treatment of autistic children mainly through educational intervention,and pictures or videos of cartoons or real things are used as learning materials in special education schols.Therefore,this paper uses the eye-tracking experiments to explore the visual processing that autistic children view animated and human picture and video stimulation.By comparing processing differences,this paper provides a basis for intervention training of autistic children.The current eye-tracking study explores how individuals with autism(N=37,form 2 special educational schools in Wuhan)preferentially attend to cartoon characters and human actors in pictures and films.There are three totally within-groups experiments.The first experiment was to compare the animation and human pictures of one person and two people with the same content.The second experiment was to compare the animation and human pictures of three and four people with the same content.The third experiment was to compare the cartoon video and human actor videos with the same content.Basis on the improvement of social intensity,explore the influence of animation and real people on the gaze characteristics of children with autism.The paper concludes as follows:Firstly,in the static and simple situation,autistic children pay more attention to the animated situation.The total fixation counts and saccade velocity of autistic children’s attention to the whole picture is remarkable,which shows that autistic children give more attention to the animated situation.In the analysis of the gaze duration of autistic children to the eye area of the characters in the picture.The interaction between character’s number and authenticity types of stimulating materials(animation or real)is significant,which shows that children pay more attention to the real eyes when one person is involved,and children pay more attention to the eyes of the characters in the animation area when two people are involved;Secondly,in static and complex situations,the number people in the picture was significant when autistic children pay attention to static pictures,including the saccade and the fixation duration to the region of interest.The more people there are,the less attention the autistic children pay to the eye area and the more attention they pay to the background and body area.The main effect of autistic children’s visual processing on the region of interest is significant,which shows that when children watch real people,they pay less attention to the facial area and more attention to the body and background;Thirdly,in dynamic and complex situations,autistic children can pay more attention to the eye areas of characters in animation,and score higher in animation situations than in real situations when recognizing characters’ emotions.The above conclusions can guide special educators to choose social-related learning content for autistic children.When the content of teaching is one person’s scene,we can use a human character in the picture.When special education teachers need to present many people and dynamic scenes for autistic children,consider using animated forms and reducing background complexity.