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Eye movements affirm: automatic overt gaze and arrow cueing for typical adults and adults with autism spectrum disorder

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Abstract

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show reduced interest towards social aspects of the environment and a lesser tendency to follow other people’s gaze in the real world. However, most studies have shown that people with ASD do respond to eye-gaze cues in experimental paradigms, though it is possible that this behaviour is based on an atypical strategy. We tested this possibility in adults with ASD using a cueing task combined with eye-movement recording. Both eye gaze and arrow pointing distractors resulted in overt cueing effects, both in terms of increased saccadic reaction times, and in proportions of saccades executed to the cued direction instead of to the target, for both participant groups. Our results confirm previous reports that eye gaze cues as well as arrow cues result in automatic orienting of overt attention. Moreover, since there were no group differences between arrow and eye gaze cues, we conclude that overt attentional orienting in ASD, at least in response to centrally presented schematic directional distractors, is typical.

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Notes

  1. As errors were only made on a relatively low number of trials medians rather than means were calculated so as to reduce the effect of outliers.

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Acknowledgments

The first author was funded by the Wolfson Research Institute, Durham University, UK. G. Kuhn and V. Benson conceived the experiment. G. Kuhn, V. Benson, S. Fletcher-Watson and S.R. Leekam wrote the paper. G. Kuhn designed the experiment and analyzed the data. H. Kovshoff, C. A. McCormick and J. Kirkby recruited the participants and ran the experiment.

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Author notes

  1. Gustav Kuhn

    Present address: Department of Psychology, Brunel University, School of Social Sciences, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, UK

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Durham, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK

    Gustav Kuhn

  2. Southampton University, Southampton, UK

    Valerie Benson, Hanna Kovshoff, Cristin A. McCormick & Julie Kirkby

  3. Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

    Sue Fletcher-Watson

  4. Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Sue R. Leekam

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  1. Gustav Kuhn
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  2. Valerie Benson
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  3. Sue Fletcher-Watson
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  4. Hanna Kovshoff
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  5. Cristin A. McCormick
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  6. Julie Kirkby
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  7. Sue R. Leekam
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Correspondence to Gustav Kuhn.

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Kuhn, G., Benson, V., Fletcher-Watson, S. et al. Eye movements affirm: automatic overt gaze and arrow cueing for typical adults and adults with autism spectrum disorder. Exp Brain Res 201, 155–165 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-2019-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-2019-7

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