Yale University, Department of Psychology, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 Jan;48(1):51-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.08.008.
A central feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an impairment in 'social attention'--the prioritized processing of socially relevant information, e.g. the eyes and face. Socially relevant stimuli are also preferentially attended in a broader categorical sense, however: observers orient preferentially to people and animals (compared to inanimate objects) in complex natural scenes. To measure the scope of social attention deficits in autism, observers viewed alternating versions of a natural scene on each trial, and had to 'spot the difference' between them--where the difference involved either an animate or inanimate object. Change detection performance was measured as an index of attentional prioritization. Individuals with ASD showed the same prioritized social attention for animate categories as did control participants. This could not be explained by lower level visual factors, since the effects disappeared when using blurred or inverted images. These results suggest that social attention - and its impairment in autism - may not be a unitary phenomenon: impairments in visual processing of specific social cues may occur despite intact categorical prioritization of social agents.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的一个核心特征是“社会注意力”受损——优先处理与社交相关的信息，例如眼睛和面部。然而，从更广泛的类别意义上讲，与社交相关的刺激也会受到优先关注：观察者在复杂的自然场景中更倾向于关注人和动物（与无生命物体相比）。为了衡量自闭症中社会注意力缺陷的范围，观察者在每次试验中交替观看自然场景的两个版本，并必须在它们之间“找出差异”——差异涉及有生命或无生命的物体。变化检测性能作为注意力优先化的指标进行测量。与对照组参与者相比，ASD 个体对有生命类别的社会注意力具有相同的优先性。这不能用较低的视觉因素来解释，因为当使用模糊或倒置的图像时，这些影响就会消失。这些结果表明，社会注意力——及其在自闭症中的障碍——可能不是一个单一的现象：尽管对社会主体进行了分类优先化，但对特定社会线索的视觉处理障碍仍可能会发生。
