Unruh Kathryn E, Sasson Noah J, Shafer Robin L, Whitten Allison, Miller Stephanie J, Turner-Brown Lauren, Bodfish James W
Vanderbilt Neuroscience Graduate Program, Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN, USA.
School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX, USA.
Front Neurosci. 2016 Dec 23;10:586. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2016.00586. eCollection 2016.
Our experiences with the world play a critical role in neural and behavioral development. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) spend a disproportionate amount of time seeking out, attending to, and engaging with aspects of their environment that are largely nonsocial in nature. In this study we adapted an established method for eliciting and quantifying aspects of visual choice behavior related to preference to test the hypothesis that preference for nonsocial sources of stimulation diminishes orientation and attention to social sources of stimulation in children with ASD. Preferential viewing tasks can serve as objective measures of preference, with a greater proportion of viewing time to one item indicative of increased preference. The current task used gaze-tracking technology to examine patterns of visual orientation and attention to stimulus pairs that varied in social (faces) and nonsocial content (high autism interest or low autism interest). Participants included both adolescents diagnosed with ASD and typically developing; groups were matched on IQ and gender. Repeated measures ANOVA revealed that individuals with ASD had a significantly greater latency to first fixate on social images when this image was paired with a high autism interest image, compared to a low autism interest image pairing. Participants with ASD showed greater total look time to objects, while typically developing participants preferred to look at faces. Groups also differed in number and average duration of fixations to social and object images. In the ASD group only, a measure of nonsocial interest was associated with reduced preference for social images when paired with high autism interest images. In ASD, the presence of nonsocial sources of stimulation can significantly increase the latency of look time to social sources of information. These results suggest that atypicalities in social motivation in ASD may be context-dependent, with a greater degree of plasticity than is assumed by existing social motivation accounts of ASD.
我们与世界的经历在神经和行为发展中起着关键作用。自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童花费大量时间去寻找、关注并参与本质上大多非社会性的环境方面。在本研究中，我们采用一种既定方法来引发和量化与偏好相关的视觉选择行为方面，以检验这一假设：对非社会性刺激源的偏好会减少ASD儿童对社会性刺激源的定向和关注。偏好性观看任务可作为偏好的客观测量方法，对一个项目观看时间比例越高表明偏好越强。当前任务使用眼动追踪技术来检查对在社会性（面孔）和非社会性内容（高自闭症相关兴趣或低自闭症相关兴趣）方面有所不同的刺激对的视觉定向和关注模式。参与者包括被诊断患有ASD的青少年和发育正常的青少年；两组在智商和性别上相匹配。重复测量方差分析显示，与低自闭症相关兴趣图像配对相比，当社会性图像与高自闭症相关兴趣图像配对时，患有ASD的个体首次注视社会性图像的潜伏期显著更长。患有ASD的参与者对物体的总注视时间更长，而发育正常的参与者更喜欢注视面孔。两组在对社会性和物体图像的注视次数和平均持续时间上也存在差异。仅在ASD组中，一项非社会性兴趣测量与在与高自闭症相关兴趣图像配对时对社会性图像的偏好降低有关。在ASD中，非社会性刺激源的存在可显著增加对社会性信息源注视时间的潜伏期。这些结果表明，ASD中社会动机的异常可能取决于情境，具有比现有ASD社会动机解释所假设的更大程度的可塑性。
