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Visual orienting in children with autism: Hyper‐responsiveness to human eyes presented after a brief alerting audio‐signal, but hyporesponsiveness to eyes presented without sound
Author(s) -
Kleberg Johan Lundin,
Thorup Emilia,
FalckYtter Terje
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
autism research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.656
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1939-3806
pISSN - 1939-3792
DOI - 10.1002/aur.1668
Subject(s) - autism , psychology , nonverbal communication , autism spectrum disorder , audio visual , audiology , developmental psychology , medicine , multimedia , computer science
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been associated with reduced orienting to social stimuli such as eyes, but the results are inconsistent. It is not known whether atypicalities in phasic alerting could play a role in putative altered social orienting in ASD. Here, we show that in unisensory (visual) trials, children with ASD are slower to orient to eyes (among distractors) than controls matched for age, sex, and nonverbal IQ. However, in another condition where a brief spatially nonpredictive sound was presented just before the visual targets, this group effect was reversed. Our results indicate that orienting to social versus nonsocial stimuli is differently modulated by phasic alerting mechanisms in young children with ASD. Autism Res 2017, 10: 246–250 . © 2016 The Authors Autism Research published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Autism Research.