title: Social Orienting and Attention Is Influenced by the Presence of Competing Nonsocial Information in Adolescents with Autism.
abstract: Background:Our experiences with the world play a critical role in neural and behavioral development. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) spend a disproportionate amount of time seeking out, attending to, and engaging with aspects of their environment that are largely nonsocial in nature. In this study we adapted an established method for eliciting and quantifying aspects of visual choice behavior related to preference to test the hypothesis that preference for nonsocial sources of stimulation diminishes orientation and attention to social sources of stimulation in children with ASD.Method:Preferential viewing tasks can serve as objective measures of preference, with a greater proportion of viewing time to one item indicative of increased preference. The current task used gaze-tracking technology to examine patterns of visual orientation and attention to stimulus pairs that varied in social (faces) and nonsocial content (high autism interest or low autism interest). Participants included both adolescents diagnosed with ASD and typically developing; groups were matched on IQ and gender.Results:Repeated measures ANOVA revealed that individuals with ASD had a significantly greater latency to first fixate on social images when this image was paired with a high autism interest image, compared to a low autism interest image pairing. Participants with ASD showed greater total look time to objects, while typically developing participants preferred to look at faces. Groups also differed in number and average duration of fixations to social and object images. In the ASD group only, a measure of nonsocial interest was associated with reduced preference for social images when paired with high autism interest images.Conclusions:In ASD, the presence of nonsocial sources of stimulation can significantly increase the latency of look time to social sources of information. These results suggest that atypicalities in social motivation in ASD may be context-dependent, with a greater degree of plasticity than is assumed by existing social motivation accounts of ASD.
authors.affiliation: Vanderbilt Neuroscience Graduate Program, Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN, USA.
authors.forename: Kathryn E
authors.initials: KE
authors.lastname: Unruh
authors.affiliation: School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Noah J
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Sasson
authors.affiliation: Vanderbilt Neuroscience Graduate Program, Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN, USA.
authors.forename: Robin L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Shafer
authors.affiliation: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center Nashville, TN, USA.
authors.forename: Allison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Whitten
authors.affiliation: Sheps Center for Health Services Research, Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
authors.forename: Stephanie J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.affiliation: Sheps Center for Health Services Research, Carolina Institute for Developmental DisabilitiesChapel Hill, NC, USA; TEACCH Autism Program, UNC School of Medicine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel HillCarrboro, NC, USA; Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of MedicineChapel Hill, NC, USA.
authors.forename: Lauren
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Turner-Brown
authors.affiliation: Vanderbilt Neuroscience Graduate Program, Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt UniversityNashville, TN, USA; Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical CenterNashville, TN, USA.
authors.forename: James W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Bodfish
keywords: circumscribed interests; eye-tracking; preferential viewing; reward; social motivation theory