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The impact of social complexity on the visual exploration of others' actions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder

BACKGROUND: Typical development of socio-communicative skills relies on keen observation of others. It thus follows that decreased social attention negatively impacts the subsequent development of socio-communicative abilities in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In addition, studies in...

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Autores principales: Robain, F., Kojovic, N., Solazzo, S., Glaser, B., Franchini, M., Schaer, M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8011208/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33789770
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-021-00553-2
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author Robain, F.
Kojovic, N.
Solazzo, S.
Glaser, B.
Franchini, M.
Schaer, M.
author_facet Robain, F.
Kojovic, N.
Solazzo, S.
Glaser, B.
Franchini, M.
Schaer, M.
author_sort Robain, F.
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Typical development of socio-communicative skills relies on keen observation of others. It thus follows that decreased social attention negatively impacts the subsequent development of socio-communicative abilities in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In addition, studies indicate that social attention is modulated by context and that greater social difficulties are observed in more socially demanding situations. Our study aims to investigate the effect of social complexity on visual exploration of others’ actions in preschoolers. METHODS: To investigate the impact of social complexity, we used an eye-tracking paradigm with 26 typically developing preschoolers (TD, age = 3.60 ± 1.55) and 37 preschoolers with ASD (age = 3.55 ± 1.21). Participants were shown videos of two children engaging in socially simple play (parallel) versus socially complex play (interactive). We subsequently quantified the time spent and fixation duration on faces, objects, bodies, as well as the background and the number of spontaneous gaze shifts between socially relevant areas of interest. RESULTS: In the ASD group, we observed decreased time spent on faces. Social complexity (interactive play) elicited changes in visual exploration patterns in both groups. From the parallel to the interactive condition, we observed a shift towards socially relevant parts of the scene, a decrease in fixation duration, as well as an increase in spontaneous gaze shifts between faces and objects though there were fewer in the ASD group. LIMITATIONS: Our results need to be interpreted cautiously due to relatively small sample sizes and may be relevant to male preschoolers, given our male-only sample and reported phenotypic differences between males and females. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that similar to TD children, though to a lesser extent, visual exploration patterns in ASD are modulated by context. Children with ASD that were less sensitive to context modulation showed decreased socio-communicative skills or higher levels of symptoms. Our findings support using naturalistic designs to capture socio-communicative deficits in ASD.
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spelling pubmed-80112082021-03-31 The impact of social complexity on the visual exploration of others' actions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder Robain, F. Kojovic, N. Solazzo, S. Glaser, B. Franchini, M. Schaer, M. BMC Psychol Research Article BACKGROUND: Typical development of socio-communicative skills relies on keen observation of others. It thus follows that decreased social attention negatively impacts the subsequent development of socio-communicative abilities in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In addition, studies indicate that social attention is modulated by context and that greater social difficulties are observed in more socially demanding situations. Our study aims to investigate the effect of social complexity on visual exploration of others’ actions in preschoolers. METHODS: To investigate the impact of social complexity, we used an eye-tracking paradigm with 26 typically developing preschoolers (TD, age = 3.60 ± 1.55) and 37 preschoolers with ASD (age = 3.55 ± 1.21). Participants were shown videos of two children engaging in socially simple play (parallel) versus socially complex play (interactive). We subsequently quantified the time spent and fixation duration on faces, objects, bodies, as well as the background and the number of spontaneous gaze shifts between socially relevant areas of interest. RESULTS: In the ASD group, we observed decreased time spent on faces. Social complexity (interactive play) elicited changes in visual exploration patterns in both groups. From the parallel to the interactive condition, we observed a shift towards socially relevant parts of the scene, a decrease in fixation duration, as well as an increase in spontaneous gaze shifts between faces and objects though there were fewer in the ASD group. LIMITATIONS: Our results need to be interpreted cautiously due to relatively small sample sizes and may be relevant to male preschoolers, given our male-only sample and reported phenotypic differences between males and females. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that similar to TD children, though to a lesser extent, visual exploration patterns in ASD are modulated by context. Children with ASD that were less sensitive to context modulation showed decreased socio-communicative skills or higher levels of symptoms. Our findings support using naturalistic designs to capture socio-communicative deficits in ASD. BioMed Central 2021-03-31 /pmc/articles/PMC8011208/ /pubmed/33789770 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-021-00553-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Robain, F.
Kojovic, N.
Solazzo, S.
Glaser, B.
Franchini, M.
Schaer, M.
The impact of social complexity on the visual exploration of others' actions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder
title The impact of social complexity on the visual exploration of others' actions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder
title_full The impact of social complexity on the visual exploration of others' actions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder
title_fullStr The impact of social complexity on the visual exploration of others' actions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder
title_full_unstemmed The impact of social complexity on the visual exploration of others' actions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder
title_short The impact of social complexity on the visual exploration of others' actions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder
title_sort impact of social complexity on the visual exploration of others' actions in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8011208/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33789770
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-021-00553-2
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