Attentional disengagement differences in young children with autism: A comparative eye-movement study using static and dynamic stimuli

Abstract

Weak attentional disengagement represents a crucial concern in children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). Failure to disengage from attended stimuli has obvious consequences for the development of everyday communication skills, and in the real world, stimuli are often dynamic as well as static. In this study, we recorded eye movements and investigated attentional disengagement in young Chinese children with and without ASC for static and dynamic stimuli. Our approach employed the gap-overlap paradigm (GOP) with stimuli consisting of static (Experiment 1: 44 ASC, 47 typically developing (TD)) or dynamic (Experiment 2: 26 ASC, 26 TD) geometric figures. Basic oculomotor function was intact in both groups. No significant group differences were observed for reflexive saccades and attentional orienting between ASC and TD children using the classic GOP. However, young children with ASC consistently exhibited prolonged voluntary disengagement (longer saccade latencies) in a modified-overlap task across both stimulus types. Furthermore, ASC children demonstrated more delayed disengagement when presented with dynamic foveal stimuli consisting of repetitive motion compared to random motion, and this effect was absent in TD children. These findings reflect how attentional biases to both static and repetitive dynamic stimuli impact upon visual disengagement, and hence have the potential to influence future development of social cognition in individuals with ASC.