The Impact of Circumscribed Interest Distractors on Attentional Orienting in Young Children with Autism: Eye-tracking Evidence from the Remote Distractor Paradigm

Abstract

Studies from free-viewing tasks (e.g., preferential looking paradigm) report that children with autism spectrum condition (ASC) exhibit an attentional bias for circumscribed interests (CI) objects (e.g., vehicles, clocks) over non-CI objects (e.g., clothes, furniture). This atypical preference has led researchers to hypothesise that ASC children would be more distracted by CI-related objects than non-CI-related objects. The current study aimed to explore this issue using a remote distractor paradigm with distractors positioned at different locations in the visual field. We found a general delayed orienting response (longer saccade latency) under foveal distractor conditions in children with autism, suggesting increased endogenous disengagement for centrally presented distractors. Additionally, children with autism produced higher error rates and fewer corrective saccades than control counterparts, indicating poorer attentional control. Neither latencies nor errors were modulated by stimulus types. However, additional analysis showed increased dwell time for CI-related objects over non-CI-related objects in the ASC group, demonstrating some support for the attentional bias for CI-related stimuli reported in visual preference paradigms. The failure to observe stimulus modulation on latencies or errors in the current experiment was discussed in relation to how task demands in basic visual attentional paradigms might mask any CI-related preference bias in ASC.