Current and past research

Do children with Autism Spectrum Disorder pay attention differentially towards items of fascination as compared to typically developing children?
Eye Movement in Dynamic and Static Scenes
An investigation of face processing in children with Asperger Syndrome.
Do children with Autism Spectrum Disorder pay attention differentially towards items of fascination as compared to typically developing children?

Lawrence Patterson, a Trainee Clinical Psychologist at the University of Southampton, is carrying out a project to look at how children pay attention to pictures they are presented with. The findings could help teachers and carers to support children to learn and engage in everyday life. If you are interested in taking part, please have a look at the attached information below (Research.pdf) and contact Lawrence directly of you are interested.

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Eye Movement in Dynamic and Static Scenes

Dr. Hanna Kovshoff would be very interested to hear from any adult with autism who would like to take part in a psychology research project at the University of Southampton.

 

This project will investigate visual attention and eye movement. To examine what people attend to, they are going to record the eye movements of participants whilst they look at displays presented on a computer screen. The aim of this work is to understand the process of visual attention when people look at dynamic versus static scenes.

 

For further information, please see the attachment or email Hannah at H.Kovshoff@soton.ac.uk

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An investigation of face processing in children with Asperger Syndrome.

 This is a report from Southampton University researcher, Katherine Cornes. She undertook some research with members of our branch in 2006.

Background
Psychological research has investigated face processing in children with Asperger Syndrome. The aim of this research is to increase our understanding of social interaction in this group of individuals. Research investigating face processing abilities in children and adolescents with Asperger Syndrome has been somewhat contradictory. Some researchers suggest that individuals with Asperger Syndrome process faces differently compared with typically developing groups and other research has not found any differences.

 

Research that has highlighted differences between individuals with and without Asperger Syndrome has explored face processing using experimental tasks that place high demands on memory and attention. Although these tasks have shown some interesting results, it is often difficult to determine whether differences between groups reflect differences in face processing. Alternatively, it is possible that individuals with Asperger Syndrome find it more difficult to remember complicated images. Other research has shown that if simple tasks are used (those that do not rely on memory ability), then individuals with Asperger Syndrome perform similarly to other groups.

 

Our study
Our task asked individuals to judge whether an upright or an oriented face dominated an image. This task does not require children to remember faces. Our earlier work has shown that as a face becomes more oriented, then children and adolescents are less likely to say that it is the dominant image. We think that because children have more experience with upright faces in the environment their brains process these faces more efficiently.

 

The aim of the study was to explore whether children and adolescents with Asperger Syndrome process faces differently. If they did, then we would expect to see that this group of individuals would show a preference for always selecting the oriented face.

 

Results
Our results showed that there were no differences between children with Asperger Syndrome and a control group of children. This suggests that when simple tasks are used, then children with Asperger Syndrome process faces in the same way as other individuals.

 

Future research
Our research so far has been unable to show that individuals with Asperger Syndrome process faces differently to other groups in experimental settings. These results raise the question as to whether it is possible to show differences between individuals with Asperger Syndrome and other groups in face processing tasks in more naturalistic contexts. In our future work we would like to explore whether children and adolescents with Asperger Syndrome are less motivated to look at faces compared with other groups of children.

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