Attentional status of faces for people with autism spectrum disorder.
Faces don’t hijack attention in adults with autism, so interventions need explicit cues, not subtle social pulls.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Remington et al. (2012) asked adults with and without autism to do a hard letter-search task. Faces popped up on the screen as distractions.
The team wanted to know if the faces would slow people down. They made the task extra hard so attention was already stretched thin.
What they found
Neurotypical adults kept getting pulled off task by the faces. Adults with autism ignored them and stayed focused.
The result shows faces do not grab automatic attention in autism, even under high mental load.
How this fits with other research
Griffith et al. (2012) saw the same thing in kids: children with autism showed no reaction-time drag from face distractors, while typical kids slowed down. The child data line up with the adult data.
Rojahn et al. (2012) used a dot-probe task and also found no quick face-orienting bias in autism. Together the three papers form a clean replication set.
Faso et al. (2016) looked like a contradiction at first. They found adults with autism were just as fast as controls when told to search for a face. The key difference is task: Anna’s study tested automatic capture; J’s tested deliberate search. When people choose to look for faces, autism performance normalizes.
Why it matters
Do not assume a client “doesn’t care” when they skip eye contact or social stimuli. Their brain simply isn’t wired to be pulled in automatically. Use explicit prompts, not subtle social cues, to draw attention to faces during instruction. Design tasks that tell the learner exactly when and where to look; don’t rely on faces to do the recruiting for you.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the role of attention in the processing of social stimuli in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Research has demonstrated that, for typical adults, faces have a special status in attention and are processed in an automatic and mandatory fashion even when participants attempt to ignore them. Under conditions of high load in a selective attention task, when irrelevant stimuli are usually not processed, typical adults continue to process distractor faces. Although there is evidence of a lack of attentional bias towards faces in ASD, there has been no direct test of whether faces are processed automatically using the distractor-face paradigm. In the present study 16 typical adults and 16 adults with ASD performed selective attention tasks with face and musical instrument distractors. The results indicated that even when the load of the central task was high, typical adults continued to be distracted by irrelevant face stimuli, whereas individuals with ASD were able to ignore them. In the equivalent non-social task, distractors had no effect at high load for either group. The results suggest that faces are processed in an automatic and mandatory fashion in typical adults but not in adults with ASD.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2012 · doi:10.1177/1362361311409257