Del Bianco Teresa, Mazzoni Noemi, Bentenuto Arianna, Venuti Paola
ODF Lab, Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy.
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2018 Dec 18;9:2629. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02629. eCollection 2018.
A defective attention to faces and eyes characterizes autism spectrum disorder (ASD), however, the role of contingent information - such as the task instructions - remains still unclear. Our study aimed to investigate the face-orienting response and the subsequent attentive selection in the presence of varying task instructions in individuals with atypical and typical development. Twenty young adults with ASD and 24 young adults with typical development participated in our eye-tracking study. The participants received one of three different instructions at the beginning of each trial and watched scenes of a social interaction. The instructions asked either to find an object (visual-search, VS), to identify which actor was paying attention to the conversation (gaze-reading, GR), or to simply watch the video (free-viewing, FV). We found that the groups did not differ in terms of proportion of first fixations to the face. Nonetheless, average looking time and proportional looking time to faces differed across groups. Furthermore, proportional looking time to faces was task-dependent in the ASD group only, with maximum proportion in the GR and minimum in the VS condition. This result cannot be explained by a lack of an initial bias to orient to the face, since the face-orienting tendency was similar in the ASD and the control group.
对面部和眼睛的注意力缺陷是自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的特征，然而，诸如任务指令等偶然信息的作用仍不清楚。我们的研究旨在调查非典型和典型发育个体在存在不同任务指令的情况下的面部定向反应和随后的注意力选择。20名患有ASD的年轻成年人和24名发育正常的年轻成年人参与了我们的眼动追踪研究。在每次试验开始时，参与者会收到三种不同指令中的一种，并观看社交互动场景。指令要求要么找到一个物体（视觉搜索，VS），要么识别哪个演员在关注对话（注视解读，GR），要么只是观看视频（自由观看，FV）。我们发现，两组在首次注视面部的比例方面没有差异。尽管如此，两组对面部的平均注视时间和注视时间比例不同。此外，仅在ASD组中，对面部的注视时间比例取决于任务，在GR条件下比例最高，在VS条件下比例最低。由于ASD组和对照组的面部定向倾向相似，因此这一结果不能用缺乏对面部定向的初始偏向来解释。
