Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA 02125, USA.
Dev Sci. 2011 Sep;14(5):980-8. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01053.x. Epub 2011 Apr 25.
Plaisted, O'Riordan and colleagues (Plaisted, O'Riordan & Baron-Cohen, 1998; O'Riordan, 2004) showed that school-age children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are faster at finding targets in certain types of visual search tasks than typical controls. Currently though, there is very little known about the visual search skills of very young children (1-3-year-olds) - either typically developing or with ASD. We used an eye-tracker to measure looking behavior, providing fine-grained measures of visual search in 2.5-year-old toddlers with and without ASD (this representing the age by which many children may first receive a diagnosis of ASD). Importantly, our paradigm required no verbal instructions or feedback, making the task appropriate for toddlers who are pre- or nonverbal. We found that toddlers with ASD were more successful at finding the target than typically developing, age-matched controls. Further, our paradigm allowed us to estimate the number of items scrutinized per trial, revealing that for large set size conjunctive search, toddlers with ASD scrutinized as many as twice the number of items as typically developing toddlers, in the same amount of time.
普莱斯特德、奥赖恩登和同事们（普莱斯特德、奥赖恩登和巴伦-科恩，1998 年；奥赖恩登，2004 年）表明，自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的学龄儿童和成年人在某些类型的视觉搜索任务中比典型对照组更快地找到目标。不过，目前对于非常年幼的儿童（1-3 岁）——无论是正常发育还是患有 ASD 的儿童——的视觉搜索技能知之甚少。我们使用眼动追踪器来测量注视行为，为患有和不患有 ASD 的 2.5 岁幼儿提供精细的视觉搜索测量（这是许多儿童可能首次被诊断为 ASD 的年龄）。重要的是，我们的范式不需要口头指导或反馈，因此适用于处于前语言或非语言阶段的幼儿。我们发现，患有 ASD 的幼儿比正常发育的、年龄匹配的对照组更成功地找到了目标。此外，我们的范式使我们能够估计每次试验中检查的项目数量，结果表明，对于大型集合的合取搜索，患有 ASD 的幼儿在相同的时间内检查的项目数量是正常发育的幼儿的两倍。
