The Relative Salience Of Nonsocial Stimuli Affects Attention To Social Stimuli In Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder

People’s attention system is sensitive to social stimuli such as faces and eyes.Typical Developmental individuals(TD)guide their behavior by understanding the intentions of social stimuli,such as faces and visual orientation.Many studies have shown that social stimulus information is not properly understood and there is atypical attention to social stimulus in Autism Spectrum Disorders(ASD).Therefore,based on the variant of the Flanker paradigm,in which the central stimulus is the target stimulus and the surrounding distraction stimulus is presented in a 3×3 staggered array,this study will conduct an experimental study on the attention of adults with ASD and TD to social and non-social stimuli.The results of experiment1 suggested that there was no significant inter-group difference in the responses of ASD and TD groups to social and non-social stimuli,but there was significant inter-group difference in the competition between social and non-social stimuli,that is,the processing patterns of the two types of stimuli were inconsistent between the ASD and TD subjects.The difference between the two groups was mainly reflected in the fact that in response to non-social goals,the TD group processed social distractions,but the ASD group did not process surrounding social distractions.Recently,studies have shown that stimuli in the visual field that are bright or salient in contrast to other objects attract attention.Experiment 2 will further explore whether the inter-group differences found in experiment 1 are significantly affected by non-social stimuli,and whether the inter-group differences found in experiment 1 still exist by adjusting the saliency of non-social stimuli.The results of experiment 2 suggested that there was no difference between the ASD and TD groups in the attention processing patterns of social and non-social stimuli under the condition of relatively high and saliency t non-social stimuli.Finally,through the comparison between experiments,it is found that there are significant differences between experiments.Therefore,the main conclusions of this experiment are as follows: The relative significance of non-social stimuli affects the differences in attentional processing patterns of social and non-social stimuli in ASD and TD groups.Only when the nonsocial stimulus was relatively low saliency,the attention processing patterns of ASD and TD differed from each other in response to the target of the non-social stimulus.TD would automatically process to the surrounding social distraction,but ASD would not process to the surrounding social distraction.When the non-social stimulus is relatively high saliency,there is no difference in the attention processing mode of ASD and TD for social and non-social stimulus.