Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Leopoldstr. 13, 80802, Munich, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Psychol Res. 2020 Nov;84(8):2248-2261. doi: 10.1007/s00426-019-01223-0. Epub 2019 Jul 10.
Theories suggest that the perception of others' actions and social cues leads to selective processing of object features. Most recently, natural pedagogy theory postulated that ostensive cues lead to a selective processing of an object's features at the expense of processing of its location. This study examined this hypothesis in 10-year-old children with and without autism spectrum condition (ASC) to better understand social information processing in ASC and the relevance of observing others in human object processing in general. Participants saw an agent either ostensively pointing to an object or non-ostensively grasping an object. Thereafter, the cued or uncued object changed either its location or identity. We assessed not only behavioral responses, but also participants' gaze behavior by means of eye tracking. In contrast to natural pedagogy theory, we found that in the non-ostensive grasping context, participants rather noticed an identity change than a location change. Moreover, location changes were more readily identified in the ostensive pointing context. Importantly, there was no difference between children with and without ASC. Our study shows that the perception of ostensively vs. non-ostensively framed actions leads to different processing of object features, indicating a close link between action perception, object processing, and social cues. Moreover, the lacking group difference in our study suggests that these basic perception-action processes are not impaired in autism.
理论表明，对他人行为和社会线索的感知会导致对物体特征的选择性处理。最近，自然教学法理论假设，明示线索会导致对物体特征的选择性处理，而牺牲对其位置的处理。本研究在 10 岁的自闭症谱系障碍（ASC）儿童和非 ASC 儿童中检验了这一假设，以更好地理解 ASC 中的社会信息处理以及在一般情况下观察他人在人类物体处理中的相关性。参与者看到一个代理要么明示地指向一个物体，要么非明示地抓住一个物体。之后，提示或未提示的物体改变了其位置或身份。我们不仅评估了行为反应，还通过眼动追踪评估了参与者的注视行为。与自然教学法理论相反，我们发现，在非明示抓取的情况下，参与者更注意到身份变化而不是位置变化。此外，在明示指向的情况下，位置变化更容易被识别。重要的是，有无 ASC 的儿童之间没有差异。我们的研究表明，对明示和非明示动作的感知会导致对物体特征的不同处理，这表明动作感知、物体处理和社会线索之间存在密切联系。此外，我们的研究中缺乏组间差异表明，这些基本的感知-动作过程在自闭症中没有受损。
