Attention Deficits and Autism

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Kanner (1943)
Early infantile syndrome Characterised by aloneness, sameness and islets of ability
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Asperger (1944)
Autistic psychopathy in childhood
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Wing and Gould (1979)
Triad of impairment; difficulties in social interaction, communication and lack of imagination
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DSM 5
Pervasive developmental disorder (Includes, autism, Asperger syndrome)
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What are the persistent deficits in social communication and interaction?
Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, deficits in non-verbal communication, deficits in developing and maintaining a relationship
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What is restrictive repetitive behaviour?
Stereotyped or repetitive speech, motor movements or object us, excessive adherence to routines, patterns and resistant to change, highly restrictive, hyper or hypo reactivity to sensory input
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What is attention ?
Differences in attention are one of the earliest features autism, thus understanding attentional differences may help with early diagnosis and early treatment
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What is non-social attention?
Ability to maintain focus on a task/stimulus for a long period of Time
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Garretson et al (1990)
Participants were presented with different stimuli and asked to respond to the presentation of a particular stimulus.
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What does the task do?
Goes on for a long time and is designed to be boring.
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What are the two types of reward?
Social reward (praise) and a tangible reward (physical object).
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What was found?
compared to controls people with autism did significantly worse when the reward was a social reward. this would suggest that they do have a deficit in sustained attention.
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However what was found?
When the reward was a tangible one they did better. They may not have an issue with sustained attention, however, they have an inability to understand social cues.
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Chein et al (2014)
Investigated the effects of sustained attention in children with autism (Aged 6-18)
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What were pps asked to?
Participants completed the Conners’ continuous performance task where they had to click the spacebar every time a letter that isn’t X is shown. Total of 120 trials, so is designed to go on for a long time.
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What did they find?
Children with Autism performed worse in sustained attention task when compared to typically developmental children but not when compared to children with ADHD.
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What would this suggest?
regardless of the reward, sustained attention is impaired  ADHD children may perform worse due to their impulsive characteristics
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Why would ADHD children perform worse?
Due to their impulsive characteristics, therefore, it appears that children with autism have deficits with sustained attention, however performance improves with presentation of non social reward.
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What is non-social attention?
Attentional shift is the ability to direct attention to different stimuli
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Landry and Bryson (2004)
Participants are presented with 3 monitors. IN shifting trials, a stimulus appears in the central monitor then disappears. A target stimulus then appears either on the left or the right of the central stimulus.
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What is recorded?
Participants eye movements are recorded to see if they are able to shift their attention
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What happens in disengage trials?
The central stimulus remains on the screen when the target stimulus is presented.
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What was found?
For shifting attention, participants with autism were as reactive compared to children with down syndrome and typically developing children
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However, when they are required to disengage from the original stimulus, what are they?
Significantly slower when compared to DS and TD
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What does this suggest?
Suggests that shifting isn’t the issue, but when they are already focusing on a stimulus, they are unable to disengage and focus on another stimulus, something labelled as ‘sticky attention’
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Courchesne et al (1994)
Shifting attention between modalities: Two attention groups
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What were the two groups?
Focused attention: Constantly respond to one stimulus (red light), Shifting attention: After responding to the first stimulus, they must swap to the other stimulus and respond to that green light
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What did they find?
Children with Autism performed significantly worse in the shifting attention task compared to typically developing children, suggesting that they do have deficits in shifting attention
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Rinehart et al (2001)
Participants had high functioning autism or low functioning autism (Asperger’s syndrome) or were typically developing matched controls.
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What were they required to do?
They were required to indicate whether a target stimulus was made up of the number 1 or 2 on a local/global scale
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What was attention switched to?
Attention was switched to the number and whether to assess the local or global information.
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What was found?
compared to matched controls HFA participants were significantly worse, whereas LFA participants were not. This suggests that shifting deficits may just be apparent in people with high functioning autism rather than low functioning
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Therefore what does the evidence suggest?
that shifting is impaired in individuals with autism. However, the evidence critiqued suggests that deficits are associated with disengaging with stimuli and that deficits may not be apparent in people with low functioning autism
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What is social attention?
Form of non-verbal communication, ability to interpret behaviour from people's eye movements, children with autism appear to show reduced eye contact, therefore, it appears that they have deficits in understanding and interpreting gaze cues
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Leekam et al (2000) Participants?
predict where the target stimulus would appear.
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What happened in the first experiment?
The experimenter provided a gaze-cue as they would look at the location where the target would appear.
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What was found?
compared to typically developing participants, people with autism were unable to use the gaze as a predictor of the stimulus, therefore suggests that they are unable to follow and interpret the information given by the cue. Is this a social deficit?
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What was the second experiment?
looked at whether a non-social object would be a better cue for children with autism (Thomas the Tank Engine).
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What happened?
Non-social object would look at where the target would appear and then participants had to predict where the target stimulus would appear.
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What was found?
Participants with ASD still performed badly compared to typically developing. Additionally, performance was worse when compared performance to the cue given by the experimenter, suggested that this could be due to poor social skills rather deficit
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What did this experiment suggest?
Children with autism were unable to interpret information given by the eyes in social situations.
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However what might it be due to?
People with ASD are not looking at the eyes in a social context and therefore miss the information given
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Klin et al (2002)
recorded participants eye movements when watching films.
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What was found?
participants with autism spent more time looking at the mouth and significantly less time looking at the eyes of the characters on the film, supporting this idea
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Van der Geest et al (2002)
when participants were shown static pictures of faces, there was no significant difference as to where participants looked.
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How was this interpreted?
People with autism were just as likely as typically developing children to lookout the eyes
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Speer et al (2007)
• Speer et al. (2007): used same film as Klin, varied whether the videos were static or dynamic, and isolated or social. Very few differences in eye movements.
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Where was the only difference found?
In the Social dynamic condition where TD spent significantly more time looking at the eyes and significantly less time looking at the body than autistic pps
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Asperger (1944)

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Autistic psychopathy in childhood

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Wing and Gould (1979)

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Card 4

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DSM 5

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Card 5

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What are the persistent deficits in social communication and interaction?

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