Abstract
Deborah Anne Kathryn Martin
The Devil Is In The Details
Enhanced visual processing and language comprehension in autism
Individuals within the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to show strong local bias when analysing incoming information. Some postulate this could be due to a more detail-oriented cognitive style, which embraces an initial local processing of a scene when viewing events (Mottron & Burack, 2001). It has also been shown that constraining verbs, which can be mapped onto a limited number of objects in a scene, can lead to an anticipation of upcoming nouns in a sentence, as shown by anticipatory eye movements to the target object of the sentence (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999). The goal of the present study was to investigate whether or not linguistic-and-visual synchronized dynamic events could lead to enhanced processing in children with ASD. Using the visual world paradigm (VWP), children with and without ASD watched dynamic scenes (with and without goal-directed action) that were matched with related sentences. Sentences contained either a constraining (causative) or non-constraining (perception/psychological) verb. It was hypothesized that those with ASD, but not neuro-typically developing (NT) children, would show anticipatory eye movements to the (target) object in the scene based on the constraining nature of causative as opposed to perception/psychological verbs. Secondly, we postulated that those scenes with goal directed action would disrupt the ability of children with ASD to find the target object, due to their poor understanding of agent intent. Results showed that while those with ASD could not anticipate upcoming sentential information, they were faster than NT children at locating the target object in the scene when presented causative sentences. In addition, agent goal-directed action did not distract the attention of those with ASD when trying to locate the target object. We suggest that these findings could provide evidence of a detail-oriented cognitive style in ASD when viewing scenes and listening to sentences concomitantly.