Search

Recent debates in the literature discuss commonalities between Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at multiple levels of putative causal networks. This debate requires systematic comparisons between these disorders that have been studied in isolation in the past, employing potential markers of each disorder to be investigated in tandem. The present study, choose superior local processing, typical to ASD, and increased Intra-Subject Variability (ISV), typical to ADHD, for a head-to-head comparison of the two disorders, while also considering the comorbid cases. It directly examined groups of participants aged 10–13 years with ADHD, ASD with (ASD+) or without (ASD−) comorbid ADHD and a typically developing (TD) group (total N = 85). A visual search task consisting of an array of paired words was designed. The participants needed to find the specific pair of words, where the first word in the pair was the cue word. This visual search task was selected to compare these groups on overall search performance and trial-to-trial variability of search performance (i.e., ISV). Additionally, scanpath analysis was also carried out using Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) and the Multi-Match Model. Results show that only the ASD− group exhibited superior search performance; whereas, only the groups with ADHD symptoms showed increased ISV. These findings point towards a double dissociation between ASD and ADHD, and argue against an overlap between ASD and ADHD.

Rich contextual and semantic information can be extracted from only a brief presentation of a natural scene. This is presumed to be activated quickly enough to guide initial eye movements into a scene. However, early, short-latency eye movements in natural scenes have been shown to be dependent on the salience distribution across the image (Anderson, Ort, Kruijne, Meeter, & Donk, 2015). In the present work, we manipulated the salience distribution across a natural scene by changing the global contrast. We showed participants a brief real or nonsense preview of the scene and examined the time-course of eye movement guidance. A real preview decreased the latency and increased the amplitude of initial saccades into the image, suggesting that the preview allowed observers to obtain additional contextual information that would otherwise not be available. However, the preview did not completely override the initial tendency for short-latency saccades to be guided by the underlying salience distribution of the image. We discuss these findings in the context of oculomotor selection based on the integration of contextual information and low-level features in a natural scene.

In two experiments, we investigated the role of apparent motion in discriminating left/right gaze deviation judgments. We demonstrated that discrimination accuracy and response confidence was significantly higher when the eyes were moved to the left or right, compared to when the eyes were presented in their final shifted position (static images). To dissociate the role of motion signals from luminance signals, gaze stimuli were also presented in reverse contrast. Replicating past studies polarity reversal had a profound and detrimental effect on gaze discrimination in static images, although, intriguingly, while response confidence remained low, participant performance improved as gaze angle increased. In striking contrast to these data, polarity reversal had no negative effect on performance when the eyes were moved. We discuss these findings in the context of a multiple-cue account of gaze perception.

In the present study, we examined the eye movement behaviour of children and adults looking at five Van Gogh paintings in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The goal of the study was to determine the role of top-down and bottom-up attentional processes in the first stages of participants’ aesthetic experience. Bottom-up processes were quantified by determining a salience map for each painting. Top-down processing was manipulated by first allowing participants to view the paintings freely, then providing background information about each painting, and then allowing them to view the paintings a second time. The salience analysis showed differences between the eye movement behaviour of children and adults, and differences between the two phases. In the children, the first five fixations during the free viewing phase were strongly related to visually salient features of the paintings—indicating a strong role for bottom-up factors. In the second phase, after children had received background information, top-down factors played a more prominent role. By contrast, adults’ observed patterns were similar in both phases, indicating that bottom-up processes did not play a major role when they viewed the paintings. In the second phase, children and adults both spent more time looking at regions that were mentioned in the background information. This effect was greater for adults than for children, confirming the notion that adults, when viewing paintings, rely much more on top-down processing than children.

A change to an object in natural scenes attracts attention when it occurs during a fixation. However, when a change occurs during a saccade, and is masked by saccadic suppression, it typically does not capture the gaze in a bottom-up manner. In the present work, we investigated how the type and direction of salient changes to objects affect the prioritization and targeting of objects in natural scenes. We asked observers to look around a scene in preparation for a later memory test. After a period of time, an object in the scene was increased or decreased in salience either during a fixation (with a transient signal) or during a saccade (without transient signal), or it was not changed at all. Changes that were made during a fixation attracted the eyes both when the change involved an increase and a decrease in salience. However, changes that were made during a saccade only captured the eyes when the change was an increase in salience, relative to the baseline no-change condition. These results suggest that the prioritization of object changes can be influenced by the underlying salience of the changed object. In addition, object changes that occurred with a transient signal (which is itself a salient signal) resulted in more central object targeting. Taken together, our results suggest that salient signals in a natural scene are an important component in both object prioritization and targeting in natural scene viewing, insofar as they align with object locations.

The intersection between personality psychology and the study of social attention has been relatively untouched. We present an initial study that investigates the influence of the Big Five personality traits on eye movement behaviour towards social stimuli. By combining a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm with canonical correlation and regression analyses, we discover that personality relates to fixations towards eye regions. Specifically, Extraversion and Agreeableness were related to greater gaze selection, while Openness to Experience was related to diminished gaze selection. The results demonstrate that who a person is affects how they move their eyes to social stimuli. The results also indicate that personality is a stronger factor in predicting social attention than past studies have suggested. Critical to the influence of personality on attention is the social situations viewers are placed in. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.