Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.
Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development and Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Feb 5;10(1):1912. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-57902-1.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by early attentional differences that often precede the hallmark symptoms of social communication impairments. Development of novel measures of attentional behaviors may lead to earlier identification of children at risk for ASD. In this work, we first introduce a behavioral measure, Relative Average Look Duration (RALD), indicating attentional preference to different stimuli, such as social versus nonsocial stimuli; and then study its association with neurophysiological activity. We show that (1) ASD and typically developing (TD) children differ in both (absolute) Average Look Duration (ALD) and RALD to stimuli during an EEG experiment, with the most pronounced differences in looking at social stimuli; and (2) associations between looking behaviors and neurophysiological activity, as measured by EEG, are different for children with ASD versus TD. Even when ASD children show attentional engagement to social content, our results suggest that their underlying brain activity is different than TD children. This study therefore introduces a new measure of social/nonsocial attentional preference in ASD and demonstrates the value of incorporating attentional variables measured simultaneously with EEG into the analysis pipeline.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的特征是早期注意力差异，这些差异通常先于社交沟通障碍的标志性症状出现。开发新的注意力行为测量方法可能会更早地识别出有患 ASD 风险的儿童。在这项工作中，我们首先引入了一种行为测量方法，即相对平均注视持续时间（RALD），用于表示对不同刺激（如社交刺激与非社交刺激）的注意力偏好；然后研究了它与神经生理活动的关联。我们发现：（1）在 EEG 实验中，ASD 和典型发育（TD）儿童在绝对平均注视持续时间（ALD）和 RALD 方面对刺激的反应存在差异，在观察社交刺激方面的差异最为明显；（2）与 EEG 测量的神经生理活动之间的关联，在 ASD 儿童与 TD 儿童之间是不同的。即使 ASD 儿童对社交内容表现出注意力参与，我们的研究结果表明，他们的大脑活动与 TD 儿童不同。因此，本研究在 ASD 中引入了一种新的社交/非社交注意力偏好测量方法，并证明了将同时通过 EEG 测量的注意力变量纳入分析流程的价值。
