Attentional allocation of autism spectrum disorder individuals: Searching for a Face-in-the-Crowd.
When adults with autism can control their viewing time, they detect faces as quickly as anyone else.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked adults with autism to find a face hidden among many objects. They could take as long as they needed.
The team compared speed and accuracy with a group of typical adults. Everyone did the task on a computer at their own pace.
What they found
Adults with autism spotted the face just as fast as typical adults. No face-detection deficit showed up.
The result tells us basic face finding is intact when people can control their attention.
How this fits with other research
Rojahn et al. (2012) saw the opposite: at super-quick 200 ms flashes, adults with autism lacked the fast face-orienting bias seen in controls. The two studies differ only in exposure time. Give people time to think and the bias returns.
Remington et al. (2012) and Griffith et al. (2012) also found that irrelevant faces fail to distract children and adults with autism. The new data extend this pattern to an active search task, showing the effect holds across ages and designs.
Harrop et al. (2018) adds sex to the picture: ASD girls keep typical face-looking preferences while ASD boys do not. Together the papers map when face attention is spared and when it varies.
Why it matters
If you run social-skills groups, do not assume learners cannot see faces. Instead, give clear, self-paced prompts and they will locate facial cues just fine. Use longer display times or let learners control the pace when you want them to benefit from typical face salience.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A study is reported which tests the proposition that faces capture the attention of those with autism spectrum disorders less than a typical population. A visual search task based on the Face-in-the-Crowd paradigm was used to examine the attentional allocation of autism spectrum disorder adults for faces. Participants were required to search for discrepant target images from within 9-image arrays. Both participants with autism spectrum disorder and control participants demonstrated speeded identification of faces compared to non-face objects. This indicates that when attention is under conscious control, both autism spectrum disorder and typically developing comparison adults show an attentional bias for faces, which contrasts with previous research which found an absence of an attentional bias for faces in autism spectrum disorder. Theoretical implications of this differentiation are discussed.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2016 · doi:10.1177/1362361315573637