Attentional bias toward pictures related to circumscribed interests in children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Background

Circumscribed interests (CIs) are regarded as one of the common symptoms for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although some studies have found attentional bias toward CI-related stimuli for individuals with ASD, few studies have directly explored the reasons for these findings.

Method

Children with ASD (n = 15) and age-matched typically developing (TD) children (n = 15) completed a Stroop-like task and a modified dot-probe task, and their reaction times were measured. The stimuli of these tasks included neutral objects and objects related to CI for individuals with ASD.

Results

Children with ASD had longer reaction times to name colors of CI-related stimuli than neutral stimuli in the Stroop-like task. Similarly, in the modified dot-probe task, if the CI-related stimulus was presented simultaneously with the neutral stimulus, children with ASD responded faster to the target that appeared in the previous location of the CI-related stimulus (i.e. congruent condition) than to the neutral stimulus (i.e. incongruent condition). Importantly, the reaction times of children with ASD in the incongruent condition were significantly slower than in the baseline condition, where both neutral stimuli were displayed simultaneously with stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of 500 ms. In contrast, there was no significant difference in reaction times to CI-related stimuli and neutral stimuli in both tasks for TD children.

Conclusions

These findings suggest children with ASD have attentional bias toward CI-related stimuli, because of difficulty disengaging attention from CI-related stimuli with SOA of 500 ms.

Keywords:

• Autism spectrum disorder
• attentional bias
• Stroop-like task
• modified dot-probe task
• circumscribed interests
• disengaging attention

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all participating children and their families who participated in this study. Special thanks to the special education school for the subjects provided for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 21&ZD293] and the Shanghai Major Innovation Project of Educational Science (Grant NO. 2019-01-07-00-05-E00007) awarded to Huizhong He.