Reduced visual disengagement but intact phasic alerting in young children with autism.
Alerting cues help kids with autism look away from pictures faster, but they still start slower, so teach shifting skills instead of relying on louder cues.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kleberg et al. (2017) watched kids with and without autism look at pictures on a screen. They timed how long each child stayed locked on one picture before moving their eyes to a new one.
Sometimes a short beep sounded right before the picture changed. The team wanted to know if the beep helped kids shift their gaze faster.
What they found
Kids with autism kept their eyes on the first picture longer than typical kids. The beep helped both groups move their eyes faster by the same amount.
In plain words, alerting cues work for kids with autism, but they still start out slower to disengage.
How this fits with other research
The result seems to clash with Kopec et al. (2020). That study found kids with autism detect quick color flashes better than peers. The difference is the task: Justin used brief, simple targets, while Lundin tested shifting attention away from a picture already being viewed.
Older work backs up the slower disengagement idea. Miller et al. (2014) and Sisson et al. (1993) also saw slower visual responses in autism across several lab tasks. Lundin adds that alerting networks are intact, so the brake is further down the line.
Adams et al. (2021) extend the point to toddlers: bright distractors hurt word learning for kids with autism more than for typical kids. Together these papers map a chain from toddler to early elementary years where sticky attention, not weak alerting, causes the trouble.
Why it matters
You can stop hoping a loud clap or timer beep will fix rigid attention. Use the beep to gain a small speed boost, then teach active looking rules such as "find the new picture" or use response-cost prompts to speed shifts. Reduce visual clutter in materials because bright side items hold kids longer than you might expect.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with autism may have difficulties with visual disengagement-that is, inhibiting current fixations and orienting to new stimuli in the periphery. These difficulties may limit these children's ability to flexibly monitor the environment, regulate their internal states, and interact with others. In typical development, visual disengagement is influenced by a phasic alerting network that increases the processing speed of the visual system after salient events. The role of the phasic alerting effect in the putative atypical disengagement performance in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is not known. Here, we compared visual disengagement in six-year-old children with autism (N = 18) and typically developing children (N = 17) matched for age and nonverbal IQ. We manipulated phasic alerting during a visual disengagement task by adding spatially nonpredictive sounds shortly before the onset of the visual peripheral targets. Children with ASD showed evidence of delayed disengagement compared to the control group. Sounds facilitated visual disengagement similarly in both groups, suggesting typical modulation by phasic alerting in ASD in the context of this task. These results support the view that atypical visual disengagement in ASD is related to other factors than atypicalities in the alerting network. Autism Res 2017, 10: 539-545. © 2016 The Authors Autism Research published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society for Autism Research.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1177/2167702613496242