Social perception in children with autism: an attentional deficit?
Autistic kids can read single social cues fine—break complex social scenes into one cue at a time during teaching.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Adkins et al. (1997) showed short stories to kids with autism and to typical kids. Each story had one clear social cue or many mixed cues. The kids answered questions about what the characters felt or would do next.
The goal was to see if autistic kids struggle only when they must blend several social hints at once.
What they found
When stories held just one cue, both groups scored the same. When stories needed piecing several cues together, the autistic group did far worse.
The trouble is not reading faces or words alone. It is juggling many social pieces at the same time.
How this fits with other research
Sutphin et al. (1998) went further. They watched kids in real play and saw autistic children also miss single, everyday cues like hearing their name. The idea grew from "only multi-cue is hard" to "even single cues can be missed."
Flanagan et al. (2015) seems to disagree. They matched kids by mental age and found normal orienting to social cues. The key difference: they told kids exactly where to look, so attention was guided. K et al. left kids to figure it out alone.
Begeer et al. (2006) also looks opposite at first glance. Autistic kids looked at facial emotions just like peers when the task said "watch the face." Again, explicit instructions erased the gap that showed up in K et al.'s open-ended stories.
Why it matters
Break complex social scenes into single, clear steps during teaching. Prompt one cue at a time: "Look at her eyes. Now listen to her voice." After mastery, slowly blend cues together. This keeps the load low and builds success.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Research suggests that the attentional deficits found in children with autism may be related to impairments in social functioning (e.g., Courchesne et al., 1994a, 1994b; Lewy & Dawson, 1992; Schreibman & Lovaas, 1973). In the present investigation, 14 children with autism, 14 mentally handicapped, and 14 typically functioning children participated in a study designed to investigate the effects of number of social cues on the ability to interpret social situations. Participants were shown videotaped vignettes of child-child interactions in which the number of cues leading to the correct interpretation of the story varied from one to four (i.e., tone, content, nonverbal, or nonverbal with object). Subjects were then asked a series of questions which varied in degree of complexity. Overall, results indicated that children with autism performed as well as both groups of comparison subjects on general attention questions (i.e., identification of number and gender of interactants) and social perception questions relating to stories containing one cue. However, children with autism performed more poorly than both comparison groups on social perception questions relating to stories containing multiple cues. Results are discussed in terms of an attentional dysfunction hypothesis of autism.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1997 · doi:10.1023/a:1025898314332