کد مقاله | کد نشریه | سال انتشار | مقاله انگلیسی | نسخه تمام متن |
---|---|---|---|---|
369959 | 621830 | 2016 | 12 صفحه PDF | دانلود رایگان |
• Typically developing (TD) children and children with ASD attend similarly to a speaking-partner’s face when talking about “things that people do”. When talking about “things that people feel”, however, children with ASD look more at the mouth and less at the eye region.
• We argue that talk about feelings drains EF resources in ASD which leads to more atypical visual attention.
• Conversational topic moderates visual attention in ASD and eye- and mouth-looking are associated with different facets of executive function (EF).
We compared the visual attention of typically developing (TD) children and age-matched children with ASD in two conversational contexts. Compared to the TD group, the ASD group had significantly fewer fixations to eyes and increased fixation time to mouths during a conversation about ‘how people feel’ but not about ‘what people do’. This shift away from eyes and towards the mouth in ASD was associated with higher autism severity, more limited executive function (EF), and poorer verbal and intellectual ability. One particularly striking result was that eye-fixation and mouth-time data correlated with different EF subdomains. We argue that talk about emotions strains EF which may contribute to atypical visual attention to faces and that eye-fixation and mouth-time data may be under the control of different facets of EF.
Journal: Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders - Volume 26, June 2016, Pages 99–110