Circumscribed interests in autism: Can animals potentially re-engage social attention?
Animal faces keep autistic kids looking even when their favorite objects are right there.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers showed kids pictures on a screen. Each slide had a face next to a favorite object like trains or wheels.
Some faces were people. Some were cats or dogs. Cameras tracked where the kids looked.
Participants were autistic children and same-age peers without autism.
What they found
When the favorite object sat beside a human face, autistic kids quickly looked away.
When the object sat beside an animal face, the kids kept looking at the animal. Their eyes stayed on the cat or dog picture.
How this fits with other research
McGonigle et al. (2014) ran the same screen setup and saw the opposite: autistic preschoolers looked away from human faces paired with favorite objects. The new study shows the face just needs to be furry, not human.
Polak-Passy et al. (2024) went further. They put real dogs inside classrooms. After a dog-training program, kids gave more non-verbal social bids and showed less hand-flapping. Static animal faces hold attention; live animals boost communication.
Ferreri et al. (2011) first proved that favorite objects pull eye gaze. The 2023 paper answers the next question: that pull can be tamed if a friendly animal is in view.
Why it matters
Next time you run a social skills group, seat a stuffed dog or play an animal screensaver beside the peer’s face. The child’s special interest stays visible, yet social attention stays on the animal face. Over time, fade the animal and keep the social gains.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Circumscribed interests (CI) in autism are highly fixated and repetitive interests, generally centering on non-social and idiosyncratic topics. The increased salience of CI objects often results in decreased social attention, thus interfering with social interactions. Behavioural, biomarker and neuroimaging research points to enhanced social functioning in autistic children in the presence of animals. For instance, neuroimaging studies report a greater activation of reward systems in the brain in response to animal stimuli whereas eye-tracking studies reveal a higher visual preference for animal faces in autistic individuals. This potentially greater social reward attached to animals, introduces the interesting and yet unexplored possibility that the presence of competing animal stimuli may reduce the disproportionately higher visual attention to CI objects. METHOD: We examined this using a paired-preference eye-tracking paradigm where images of human and animal faces were paired with CI and non-CI objects. 31 children (ASD n = 16; TD n = 15) participated in the study (3391 observations). RESULTS: Autistic children showed a significantly greater visual attention to CI objects whereas typical controls showed a significantly greater visual attention to social images across pairings. Interestingly, pairing with a CI object significantly reduced the social attention elicited to human faces but not animal faces. Further, in pairings with CI objects, significantly greater sustained attention per visit was seen for animal faces when compared to human faces. CONCLUSIONS: These results thus suggest that social attention deficits in ASD may not be uniform across human and animal stimuli. Animals may comprise a potentially important stimulus category modulating visual attention in ASD.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2023 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2023.104486