title: Top-down attentional modulation in autistic spectrum disorders is stimulus-specific.
abstract: This study investigated top-down modulation of bottom-up attentional capture in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) and in a typically developing (TD) comparison group using a spatial-cuing task (Experiment 1) and a series of visual search tasks (Experiment 2) employing task-irrelevant distractors. The effect of color and onset singleton distractors was investigated. The TD group showed similar top-down modulation of color and onset stimuli. The ASD group showed typical top-down modulation of color stimuli, but impaired top-down modulation of onset stimuli. The results suggest that children with ASDs may be impaired at prioritizing dynamic stimuli; this has implications for social processing impairments in ASDs.
authors.affiliation: University of Cambridge, Cambridge. United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Greenaway
authors.forename: Kate
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Plaisted
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology*; D002648:Child; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D011930:Reaction Time; D013028:Space Perception