The effect of background elements of pictures on the visual attention among ASD children with intellectual disabilities, children with intellectual disabilities and typical development: Evidence from eye-tracking and fMRI.
Erase picture backgrounds to pull face gaze from kids with autism plus ID, matching typical eye patterns without extra tech.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team showed picture stories to three groups: kids with autism plus intellectual disability, kids with only intellectual disability, and typically developing kids.
They used eye-tracking cameras and brain scans to see where each child looked.
Some pictures kept busy backgrounds; others had the background erased so only the main character stayed.
What they found
When backgrounds were wiped clean, the autism-plus-ID group stared longer at faces and followed the story gaze like typical kids.
Their brain also lit up more in the face area, showing the pictures felt more meaningful.
Busy backgrounds pulled these kids away from faces; simple backgrounds put faces back in focus.
How this fits with other research
Wang et al. (2023) worked with younger ASD-only preschoolers and got a similar boost by adding a game-like "find the face" task.
Zhao et al. (2023) saw the opposite problem: live conversation made Chinese ASD kids look more at the background, not the speaker.
The two studies seem to clash, but one tested live chat while the other tested still pictures, so both point to the same fix—cut visual clutter.
Anthony et al. (2020) showed ASD kids split looks evenly between people and objects; our study proves that simply deleting extra objects pushes attention back to people.
Why it matters
You can make free picture cards in minutes. Open any clip-art or storybook page, hit "remove background," and laminate.
Use these clean images during social stories, vocabulary drills, or emotion lessons.
Less clutter means more face time, and more face time builds better social learning for kids with autism and intellectual disability.
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Join Free →Take this week’s storybook pages into PowerPoint, use the background-removal tool, and re-run the lesson while tracking face gaze with pen-and-paper tallies.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Traditional picture books for children come with colourful images and a multitude of elements to attract attention and increase the reading interest of typical-developing (TD) children. However, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are less capable of filtering out unimportant elements in pictures and focusing on social items (e.g., human faces). This study proposed that the removal of background and less important elements in the pictures of children's storybooks could facilitate better attention and enhance children with ASD's focus on the main object and thus the intended meaning of the storybook. We adopted pictures from a well-known children's book and modified them by removing the inessential background elements. Then, ASD children with intellectual disabilities (ASD+ID) (n = 40), children with ID (n = 38) and TD (n = 40) were asked to view the original and modified pictures in an eye-tracking experiment, respectively. Additionally, brain activation of ASD+ID participants (n = 10) was recorded as they were viewing those pictures in an fMRI scan. Eye-tracking found that ASD+ID children viewed the modified pictures with significantly longer average fixations, fewer fixations, fewer saccades, and higher fixation/saccade duration ratio. Contrary to the original pictures, no significant differences were found among ASD+ID, ID only and TD. Especially, ASD+ID group showed highly similar visual patterns to the TD participants when viewing the modified pictures and particularly focusing on the main character in the pictures. Additional fMRI evidence on ASD+ID group also revealed that modified pictures were associated with enhanced activation in bilateral fusiform gyri as compared to those from original pictures, which might suggest increased visual attention. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed in light of our findings.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2023 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2023.104602