Plaisted K, O'Riordan M, Baron-Cohen S
University of Cambridge, Downing Site, UK.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 1998 Jul;39(5):777-83.
Children with and without autism were compared on two visual search tasks in which a letter target appeared among two sets of letter distracters. In one task, the target shared colour with one set of distracters but was unique in shape--the feature search task. In the other, the conjunctive search task, the target shared colour with one set and shape with another set of distracters. Although search was slower in the conjunctive task than the feature task in normally developing control children, children with autism showed no significant slowing in reaction time in the conjunctive task and were faster than control children in this task. This result is discussed in the light of theories of visual search which state that rate of search is determined by the degree of similarity between target and distracters.
研究人员让患有自闭症和未患自闭症的儿童完成两项视觉搜索任务，在这两项任务中，一个字母目标出现在两组字母干扰项中。在一项任务中，目标与一组干扰项颜色相同，但形状独特——这是特征搜索任务。在另一项联合搜索任务中，目标与一组干扰项颜色相同，与另一组干扰项形状相同。虽然在正常发育的对照组儿童中，联合任务的搜索速度比特征任务慢，但患有自闭症的儿童在联合任务中的反应时间没有显著减慢，并且在这项任务中比对照组儿童更快。根据视觉搜索理论对这一结果进行了讨论，该理论认为搜索速度由目标与干扰项之间的相似程度决定。
