Division of Neuroscience and Experimental Psychology, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M139PL, UK.
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, Sussex, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2021 Aug;83(6):2498-2509. doi: 10.3758/s13414-021-02302-4. Epub 2021 Apr 30.
Selective attention to a sensory modality has been observed experimentally in studies of the modality-shift effect - a relative performance benefit for targets preceded by a target in the same modality, compared to a different modality. Differences in selective attention are commonly observed in autism and we investigated whether exogenous (automatic) shift costs between modalities are increased. Autistic adults and neurotypical controls made speeded discrimination responses to simple visual, tactile and auditory targets. Shift costs were observed for each target modality in participant response times and were largest for auditory targets, reflective of fast responses on auditory repeat trials. Critically, shift costs were similar between the groups. However, integrating speed and accuracy data using drift-diffusion modelling revealed that shift costs in drift rates (reflecting the quality of information extracted from the stimulus) were reduced for autistic participants compared with neurotypicals. It may be that, unlike neurotypicals, there is little difference between attention within and between sensory modalities for autistic people. This finding also highlights the benefit of combining reaction time and accuracy data using decision models to better characterise selective attention in autism.
选择性注意一种感觉模式在模态转换效应的研究中得到了实验观察 - 与不同模态相比，同一模态之前的目标具有相对的表现优势。选择性注意的差异在自闭症中很常见，我们研究了外源性（自动）模态之间的转移成本是否增加。自闭症成人和神经典型对照组对简单的视觉、触觉和听觉目标进行了快速辨别反应。参与者的反应时间观察到了每个目标模态的转移成本，听觉目标的转移成本最大，反映了听觉重复试验的快速反应。关键是，两组之间的转移成本相似。然而，使用漂移扩散模型整合速度和准确性数据表明，自闭症参与者的漂移率转移成本（反映从刺激中提取的信息质量）与神经典型参与者相比有所降低。与神经典型者不同，自闭症者的感觉模态内和模态间的注意力可能没有太大差异。这一发现还强调了使用决策模型结合反应时间和准确性数据来更好地描述自闭症选择性注意的好处。
