关键词: 自闭症谱系障碍, 背景性质, 面孔搜索, 面孔加工, 眼动

Abstract: One of the core issues in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is problematic social interaction (Geschwind, 2009). Faces may be the most ‘‘social” of visual stimuli. From faces, and especially from eyes, humans are prone to extract social information like emotional disposition or communicative intent during conversation with others (de Wit, Falck-Ytter, & von Hofsten, 2008). Detecting a face within the scene is a crucial step in attending to the information portrayed by that face, such as communicative facial signals, so the face capture becomes particularly important (Riby & Hancock, 2008b). To explore the role of background nature in the faces searching and processing with ASD, two experiments were involved in current research that required 14 ASD children and 20 typically developing individuals, aged 7-10, to look at a range of pictures whilst having their gaze behavior monitored. In Experiment 1, a 2 (Participant: ASD vs. TD) × 2 (Embedded object: face vs. earth) mixed design was employed. The semantic inconsistency involve scenes with embedded faces or earth images. In Experiment 2, a 2 (Participant: ASD vs. TD) × 3 (Face: human face, dog’s face, back of head) mixed design was employed. The task involve scrambled pictures of a person or a dog with meaningless background. The results showed that there were no facilitation of semantic conspicuity background in face searching of ASD children. They consistently taken significantly longer time to locate at the face than those in the control group; and they took less time to search face than the inanimate object. There were no interference of meaningless scrambled background on face searching of ASD children, but prolong that of TD. Cross the two experiments, once the people’s faces were looked, children with ASD spent less time on the nose and mouth than typically developing group, but the fixation duration on eyes did not differ between the two groups. It is suggested that the face searching and processing of the ASD children were no effected by the background nature; the ASD children made a significantly less visual attention on face than individuals without autism, but their face searching and processing patterns are similar to the typically group.

Key words: autism spectrum disorder, background nature, faces search, face process, eye movemnet