Distraction by action: higher autism spectrum quotients, less distraction
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1
UCLA, Department of Psychology, United States
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2
Monash University, School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Australia
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3
UCLA, Department of Statistics, United States
Background. The visual system receives more information than it can process, and therefore needs to select the likely relevant information for processing, and disregard the other information. This selective process is performed by attention. What is considered important information, depends on the context, but potentially also on the individual. Autism spectrum disorder is reportedly linked to a decreased biological motion processing. We therefore investigated if this is partly due to a decrease in automatic allocation of attention to biological motion.
Methods. We presented the participants with a central attention-demanding task: a rapid serial visual presentation of colored crosses, of which participants had to count the number of upright yellow and inverted green crosses. Performance on this task was the dependent measure. Concurrently with this task, we showed walking and boxing point-light animations in the periphery. We displayed two walkers (either above/below fixation, or left/right of fixation) and two boxers (displayed at the remaining two position, above/below or left/right of fixation). In intact conditions, one of the two action types was intact, the other was scrambled; in scrambled conditions, all four stimuli were scrambled. This manipulation ensured that local motion information was identical in all experimental conditions, and only global information differed. These animations were irrelevant to the task. We measured the autism spectrum quotient (AQ) for each participant, and correlated the AQ with task performance.
Results. We found that with scrambled animations there was no correlation between the AQ and task performance; overall performance was around 70% correct. However for intact actions (both for walkers and boxers), there was a significant correlation between AQ and task performance, such that participants with low AQ scores performed below baseline when intact walkers or boxers were presented, while participants with high AQ scores still performed at baseline.
Discussion. People with few autistic traits automatically process global aspects of biological motion even when this is detrimental to their central task performance. Such automatic processing of biological motion is indicative of a “hard-wired” bias toward global processing of action information, because it cannot be switched off. This processing is absent in people with many autistic traits.
Keywords:
Visual Processing,
Autism Spectrum Disorders,
Attention,
Biological motion,
autistic traits
Conference:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Nov - 1 Dec, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Oral
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
Van Boxtel
JJ and
Lu
H
(2013). Distraction by action: higher autism spectrum quotients, less distraction.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.212.00001
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Received:
03 Nov 2013;
Published Online:
25 Nov 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Jeroen J Van Boxtel, UCLA, Department of Psychology, Los Angeles, United States, j.j.a.vanboxtel@gmail.com