This project represents a first step toward our long-term goal of understanding the psychological and brain bases of social attention deficits in autism. Findings would inform many areas of autism research, including: phenomenology, genetic epidemiology, screening and diagnostics, and treatment response. Disrupted attention to eye gaze and abnormal visual processing of faces are two attractive candidate hypotheses about core autistic deficits. The experimental literature on these topics, however, describes conflicting findings. This study will test hypotheses about disrupted attention to eye gaze in autism by adapting a classical visual attention task (comparing gaze cues to simple box and arrow cues). Discrepant findings in the field are likely due to the complexities of controlling key variables in such tasks in an extremely challenging study population.
Specific Aim 1 : The design in this proposal addresses these issues in an incisive way, controlling for confounding effects of eye movement and adding within-subject control conditions to the spatial attention task, necessary to disambiguate results seen with prior studies using gaze cues.
Specific Aim 2 : A converging task, using variants of classical visual search methods, will explore the potential failure of the eye region of the face to capture attention in autistic individuals. These experiments will involve 60 children, ages 9-12: 30 each from two contrasting groups: high functioning autistic disorder (mental retardation excluded) and typically developing (no diagnosis). The between-group design tests for social but not basic attention deficits in autism and normal attention in the typical children. These pilot behavioral experiments will set the stage for a future neuroimaging proposal (functional magnetic resonance imaging: fMRI). Should the efforts proposed here be successful, future proposals for behavioral and imaging studies would include developmental contrasts (children of different ages and adults), clinical contrasts (e.g., attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder sub types), and genetically informed designs (e.g., sibling designs for autistic spectrum individuals;and affected and unaffected siblings within population-defined, heritable ADHD subtypes) to explore the heritability of psychological and neural factors associated with autism (and ADHD).
This study of the psychological and brain bases of autism is relevant to public health because it will help characterize aspects of the most serious psychiatric disorder of childhood in ways that will make autism more amenable to genetic, screening, and interventional studies. As such it will improve early identification, which is crucial for improving outcome in affected individuals.
| Pruett Jr, John R; Hoertel, Sarah; Constantino, John N et al. (2013) Impaired eye region search accuracy in children with autistic spectrum disorders. PLoS One 8:e58167 |
| Pruett Jr, John R; LaMacchia, Angela; Hoertel, Sarah et al. (2011) Social and non-social cueing of visuospatial attention in autism and typical development. J Autism Dev Disord 41:715-31 |
