Gaze cues in complex, real-world scenes direct the attention of high-functioning adults with autism Elizabeth Redcay (redcay@umd.edu) Daniel O’Young (droyoung@umd.edu) L. Robert Slevc (slevc@umd.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 USA Penelope L. Mavros (lmavros@mit.edu) John D. Gabrieli (gabrieli@mit.edu) Pawan Sinha (sinha@mit.edu) Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Abstract social development. While joint attention refers to both the initiation of a bid for joint attention and the response, the focus of the current paper is on processes that may underlie atypical responding. Atypical responding to joint attention could be due to general differences in visual attention (e.g., Brenner, Turner, & Muller, 2007), social attention specifically, for example reduced attention to people, faces, and eyes (Klin, Jones, Schultz, Volkmar, et al., 2002; Pelphrey et al., 2002), and/or a failure to direct one’s own attention based on cues from others, to name a few. These various aspects of joint attention behavior have been investigated in a number of different experimental paradigms, however evidence for difficulties with these processes in individuals with autism has been mixed - at least in experimental contexts. Social attention in autism has been investigated in several ways including the collection of eye-tracking data during viewing of videos, scenes, or pictures of faces and the examination of response patterns during a change blindness paradigm 1 . The first eye-tracking studies to examine whether social attention was atypical in ASD revealed reduced attention to people, and in particular to their eyes, during video viewing (Klin et al., 2002; Pelphrey et al., 2002). While more recent evidence also supports this atypical focus of attention on people within a scene, and on eyes within a face (e.g., Jones, Carr, & Klin, 2008; Dalton et al., 2005; Spezio, Adolphs, Hurley, & Piven, 2007), other evidence does not (e.g, Bar-Haim, Shulman, Lamy, & Reuveni, 2006). Recent studies have capitalized on change blindness methods in order to ask whether attention in a complex scene is prioritized to social aspects of the scene. These studies find that visual attention is prioritized for social agents (New, Schultz, Wolf, Niehaus et al., 2010; Fletcher-Watson, Leekam, Benson, et al., 2009) and eyes (Fletcher-Watson, Leekam, Findlay, & Stanton, 2008) in typical individuals and those with ASD. Thus, among a Abstract Autism is characterized by atypical use of social communicative cues, such as another person’s gaze or point. Despite these real-world difficulties, experimental manipulations often reveal minimal group differences. One factor that may contribute to this failure to find differences is the use of oversimplified and decontextualized social stimuli to examine these behaviors (e.g., a solo floating face). In the current study, we examined whether typical individuals and those with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder would use subtle gaze cues embedded in a natural, real-world scene to aid them in a change detection task using flicker presentation. Each scene contained three changes, and in some pictures, one of those changes was in the direction of gaze of the people in the scene. Even though neither group was aware that gaze cues aided in identification of the change, both groups showed a robust effect of gaze cues in change detection, such that changes in the line of gaze were detected first in a scene more often than those not in the line of gaze. These data illustrate typical use of gaze cues in high- functioning adults with ASD even in the context of a complex, naturalistic scene. Our findings suggest that attention to gaze cues may not be at the root of difficulties with joint attention in adults with autism Keywords: change spectrum disorder. blindness; joint attention; autism Introduction Imagine we are taking a walk in a park and a bird flies overhead. I point to it and look at you, then you look at the bird and you tell me it’s a magpie. These simple instances of joint attention, or the intentional coordination of one’s own attention with another on an object or topic, occur often in everyday social interactions. Joint attention interactions begin in infancy and provide a robust social learning tool for those who engage in them (e.g., Baldwin et al., 1996; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, et al., 2005). Atypical joint attention is a hallmark characteristic in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (e.g., Charman, 2003; Mundy & Newell, 2007, but see Gernsbacher, Stevenson, Khandakar, & Goldsmith, 2008) and early joint attention abilities are correlated with atypical language and In a change blindness paradigm participants must identify small change(s) between two images through comparing images side-by-side or through flicker presentation.
['Elizabeth Redcay', "Daniel R. O'Young", 'Slevc Lr', 'Penelope L. Mavros', 'John D. E. Gabrieli', 'Pawan Sinha']
Gaze cues in complex, real-world scenes direct the attention of high-functioning adults with autism