Department of Psychology, University of Durham, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK.
Exp Brain Res. 2010 Mar;201(2):155-65. doi: 10.1007/s00221-009-2019-7. Epub 2009 Oct 2.
People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show reduced interest towards social aspects of the environment and a lesser tendency to follow other people's gaze in the real world. However, most studies have shown that people with ASD do respond to eye-gaze cues in experimental paradigms, though it is possible that this behaviour is based on an atypical strategy. We tested this possibility in adults with ASD using a cueing task combined with eye-movement recording. Both eye gaze and arrow pointing distractors resulted in overt cueing effects, both in terms of increased saccadic reaction times, and in proportions of saccades executed to the cued direction instead of to the target, for both participant groups. Our results confirm previous reports that eye gaze cues as well as arrow cues result in automatic orienting of overt attention. Moreover, since there were no group differences between arrow and eye gaze cues, we conclude that overt attentional orienting in ASD, at least in response to centrally presented schematic directional distractors, is typical.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者对环境的社交方面表现出较低的兴趣，也较少倾向于跟随现实世界中其他人的目光。然而，大多数研究表明，自闭症患者确实会对实验范式中的目光线索做出反应，尽管这种行为可能基于一种非典型的策略。我们在使用结合眼动记录的提示任务中测试了 ASD 成人的这种可能性。无论是注视还是箭头提示干扰源，都会在眨眼反应时间以及向提示方向而不是目标方向执行的眨眼比例上产生明显的提示效应，对于两个参与者群体都是如此。我们的结果证实了之前的报告，即目光线索和箭头线索都会导致明显的注意力自动指向。此外，由于箭头和目光线索之间没有组间差异，我们得出结论，至少对于中枢呈现的示意性方向干扰源，自闭症中的明显注意力定向是典型的。
