title: Gaze Following in Children with Autism: Do High Interest Objects Boost Performance?
abstract: This study tested whether including objects perceived as highly interesting by children with autism during a gaze following task would result in increased first fixation durations on the target objects. It has previously been found that autistic children differentiate less between an object another person attends to and unattended objects in terms of this measure. Less differentiation between attended and unattended objects in ASD as compared to control children was found in a baseline condition, but not in the high interest condition. However, typically developing children differentiated less between attended and unattended objects in the high interest condition than in the baseline condition, possibly reflecting reduced influence of gaze cues on object processing when objects themselves are highly interesting.
authors.affiliation: Uppsala Child and Baby Lab, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, 751 42, Uppsala, Sweden. emilia.thorup@psyk.uu.se.
authors.forename: Emilia
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0442-0569
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Thorup
authors.affiliation: Uppsala Child and Baby Lab, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, 751 42, Uppsala, Sweden.
authors.forename: Johan Lundin
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Kleberg
authors.affiliation: Uppsala Child and Baby Lab, Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, 751 42, Uppsala, Sweden.|Karolinska Institute Center of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (KIND), Pediatric Neuropsychiatry Unit, Department of Women's and Children's Health, Karolinska Institutet, Gävlegatan 22, 11330, Stockholm, Sweden.|Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Center for Psychiatry Research, Stockholm County Council, Stockholm, Sweden.
authors.forename: Terje
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Falck-Ytter
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000503:physiopathology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male
keywords: Circumscribed interests; Communication; Gaze following; Joint attention; Social cognition