Abstract
Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are known to have different patterns of visual attention compared to Neuro-typical (NT) adults in naturalistic social scenes. However, these differences are hard to reproduce in the lab using sparse/static stimuli. How do ASD adults attend to socially relevant information in dynamic scenes and what are the implications for scene perception? Attention and scene representation of dynamic naturalistic scenes was investigated between ASD and NT adults using a change blindness paradigm. Participants viewed highly cluttered videos of an actor performing a three part everyday task such as watering a plant (running water, filling watering can, watering plant). The actor always left the scene before completing the third part. Participants were asked to identify a change made to an object in the scene after the actor’s exit. One of three change conditions was used: (1) an object irrelevant to the task (e.g. a cup); (2) an object touched and utilized as part of the task (e.g. watering can); or (3) an object that was implied by the task (e.g. plant). Gaze behavior and ability to detect the change was measured. The overall change detection ability of both groups was similar. However, the NT group show an increased ability to detect changes to the utilized object (p<.05) that the ASD group did not. Analysis of gaze behavior indicated that this difference was not due to a decrease in dwell time on the utilized object as ASD adults increased gaze to the utilized and implied objects after the action to the same degree as NT. These results suggest that both groups attend to socially relevant objects (utilized or implied) in the same way but attention to an object does not facilitate change detection to the same degree as in NT.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012