Eye movements reveal no immediate “WOW” (“which one's weird”) effect in autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developed (TD) adult participants viewed pairs of scenes for a simple “spot the difference” (STD) and a complex “which one's weird” (WOW) task. There were no group differences in the STD task. In the WOW task, the ASD group took longer to respond manually and to begin fixating the target “weird” region. Additionally, as indexed by the first-fixation duration into the target region, the ASD group failed to “pick up” immediately on what was “weird”. The findings are discussed with reference to the complex information processing theory of ASD (Minshew & Goldstein, 1998).

Keywords:

• Autism spectrum disorder
• Eye movements
• Online cognitive processing
• Complex information processing

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant awarded to the first author from the Worldwide Universities Network Development Fund, and an International Travel award from The Royal Society.