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Detecting Social and Non-Social Changes in Natural Scenes: Performance of Children with and Without Autism Spectrum Disorders and Typical Adults

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Abstract

We probed differences in the ability to detect and interpret social cues in adults and in children and young adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by investigating the effect of various social and non-social contexts on the visual exploration of pictures of natural scenes. Children and adolescents relied more on social referencing cues in the scene as compared to adults, and in the presence of such cues, were less able to use other kinds of cues. Typically developing children and adolescents were no better than those with ASD at detecting changes within the various social contexts. Results suggest children and adolescents with ASD use relevant social cues while searching a scene just as typical children do.

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Notes

  1. We selected as many picture pairs of a given condition as met our criteria, which is the reason for the unequal numbers of trials across the different conditions.

  2. More sensitive measurements of eye movements and scan patterns did find some subtle problems relating to social attention in young adults with autism (Fletcher-Watson et al. 2009).

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Saumil Patel for reviewing several earlier versions of our manuscript, and Prof. Thomas Hebert for providing the reference for computing image contrast. We also thank the participants and their families. The research on which this paper is based was supported in part by a grant to Bhavin R. Sheth from Autism Speaks/National Alliance for Autism Research, by a grant to Katherine A. Loveland from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P01 HD035471) and by a grant to Deborah A. Pearson from the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH072263).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Center for NeuroEngineering and Cognitive Science, University of Houston, Houston, TX, 77204-4005, USA

    Bhavin R. Sheth

  2. University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    James Liu & Olayemi Olagbaju

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Larry Varghese

  4. Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, 77030, USA

    Rosleen Mansour, Stacy Reddoch, Deborah A. Pearson & Katherine A. Loveland

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  1. Bhavin R. Sheth
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  2. James Liu
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  3. Olayemi Olagbaju
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  4. Larry Varghese
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  8. Katherine A. Loveland
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Correspondence to Bhavin R. Sheth.

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Sheth, B.R., Liu, J., Olagbaju, O. et al. Detecting Social and Non-Social Changes in Natural Scenes: Performance of Children with and Without Autism Spectrum Disorders and Typical Adults. J Autism Dev Disord 41, 434–446 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-1062-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-1062-3

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