Alteration of Attentional Blink in High Functioning Autism: A Pilot Study

No evidence for superior distractor filtering amongst individuals high in autistic-like traits

Autistic individuals and individuals with high levels of autistic-like traits often show better visual search performance than their neurotypical peers. The present work investigates whether this advantage stems from increased ability to filter out distractors. Participants with high or low levels of autistic-like traits completed an attentional blink task in which trials varied in target-distractor similarity. The results showed no evidence that high levels of autistic-like traits were associated with superior distractor filtering (indexed by the difference in the size of the attentional blink across the high- and low-similarity distractors). This suggests that search advantages seen in previous studies are likely linked to other mechanisms such as enhanced pre-attentive scene processing, better decision making, or more efficient response selection.

Equivalent own name bias in autism: An EEG study of the Attentional Blink

The “Attentional Blink” refers to difficulty in detecting the second of two target stimuli presented in rapid temporal succession. Studies have shown that salient target stimuli, such as one’s own name, reduce the magnitude of this effect. Given indications that self-related processing is altered in autism, it is an open question whether this attentional self-bias is reduced in autism. To investigate this, in the current study we utilised an Attentional Blink paradigm involving one’s own and others’ names, in a group of 24 autistic adults, and 22 neurotypical adults, while measuring EEG. In line with previous studies, the Attentional Blink was reduced when the participant’s own name was the second target, with no differences between autistic and neurotypical participants. ERP results show that the effect on the Attentional Blink of one’s own name was reflected in increased N2 and P3 amplitudes, for both autistic and nonautistic individuals. This is the first event-related potential study of own-name processing in the context of the Attentional Blink. The results provide evidence of an intact attentional self-bias in autism, both at the behavioural and neural level.

Attentional Blink in Pilots and Its Relationship With Flight Performance

Objective

In flight, military pilots need to monitor changes in the external environment and monitor the situation of the aircraft at the same time. Attentional blink (AB) reflects attentional blindness in time. Therefore, the present study investigated the AB effect in military pilots and its relationship with flight performance.

Methods

Thirty male military pilots (44.23 ± 4.07 years old) and 29 control participants (44.07 ± 2.93 years old) underwent testing with the classic rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. The participants’ accuracy in detecting a second target stimulus (T2/T1) on the basis of their correctly response to the first target stimulus (T1) was calculated to measure the AB effect. The flight performance of these military pilots was also collected.

Results

The participants’ accuracy in detecting T2/T1 at positions of 180, 270, 360, and 450 ms was significantly lower than that in detecting T1 in both groups. The military pilots’ detection accuracy of T2/T1 at the positions of 180 ms (p < 0.001) and 270 ms (p < 0.001) was significantly higher than that of the control participants, and their mean detection accuracy of T2/T1 (AB effect) at the positions of 180, 270, 360, and 450 ms was also significantly higher than that of the control participants (p < 0.001). There was a significant correlation between the AB effect and the lowest flight performance score for the military pilots (r = 0.52, p = 0.004), and the regression coefficient was significant (β = 0.514, p = 0.004, R² = 0.31).

Conclusions

Both groups experienced the AB effect, but the military pilots’ performance regarding the AB effect was better than that of the control participants. The AB effect can predict the lowest flight performance score in military pilots. These findings may have implications for the grounding and selection of Chinese military pilots.

Adults blink more deeply: a comparative study of the attentional blink across different age groups

The attentional blink (AB) is thought to help the visual system parse and categorize rapidly changing information by segmenting it into temporal chunks, and is elicited using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. It is reflected in a decrease in accuracy at detecting the second of two targets presented within 200-500 ms of the first, and its development appears to be protracted on tasks that require set-shifting. Here, younger (M = 8.5 years) and older (M = 12.8 years) children and adults (M = 19.13 years) completed a simple AB task with no set-shift requirement in which participants detected two letters in a stream of numbers presented at a rate of 135 ms/item. In addition to assessing the developmental course of the AB on this simple task, we also assessed temporal order errors, or swaps. The AB and its associated characteristics are present in both groups but developmental differences were noted in the depth of the AB, and the presence or absence of lag-1 sparing. These developmental changes were explained by changes in a single parameter, inhibition, using the eTST model, which suggests that the AB is an adaptive function of the visual system.

Threatening faces fail to guide attention for adults with autistic-like traits

Individuals diagnosed with autistic spectrum conditions often show deficits in processing emotional faces relative to neurotypical peers. However, little is known about whether similar deficits exist in neurotypical individuals who show high-levels of autistic-like traits. To address this question, we compared performance on an attentional blink task in a large sample of adults who showed low- or high-levels of autistic-like traits on the Autism Spectrum Quotient. We found that threatening faces inserted as the second target in a rapid serial visual presentation were identified more accurately among individuals with low- compared to high-levels of autistic-like traits. This is the first study to show that attentional blink abnormalities seen in autism extend to the neurotypical population with autistic-like traits, adding to the growing body of research suggesting that autistic-related patterns of behaviors extend into a subset of the neurotypical population. Autism Res 2017, 10: 311-320. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Multiple object tracking in autism spectrum disorders

Difficulties in visual attention are often implicated in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) but it remains unclear which aspects of attention are affected. Here, we used a multiple object tracking (MOT) task to quantitatively characterize dynamic attentional function in children with ASD aged 5-12. While the ASD group performed significantly worse overall, the group difference did not increase with increased object speed. This finding suggests that decreased MOT performance is not due to deficits in dynamic attention but instead to a diminished capacity to select and maintain attention on multiple targets. Further, MOT performance improved from 5 to 10 years in both typical and ASD groups with similar developmental trajectories. These results argue against a specific deficit in dynamic attention in ASD.

Modulation of attentional blink with emotional faces in typical development and in autism spectrum disorders

BACKGROUND

The attentional blink (AB) phenomenon was used to assess the effect of emotional information on early visual attention in typically developing (TD) children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The AB effect is the momentary perceptual unawareness that follows target identification in a rapid serial visual processing stream. It is abolished or reduced for emotional stimuli, indicating that emotional information has privileged access to early visual attention processes.

METHODS

We examined the AB effect for faces with neutral and angry facial expressions in 8- to 14-year-old children with and without an ASD diagnosis.

RESULTS

Children with ASD exhibited the same magnitude AB effect as TD children for both neutral and angry faces.

CONCLUSIONS

Early visual attention to emotional facial expressions was preserved in children with ASD.

Visual attentional blink in dyslexic children: Parameterizing the deficit

The parameters generated by a curve fitting method on the visual attentional blink (AB) of 14 dyslexic and 14 control children were compared. The two groups differed on AB minimum parameters, whereas both AB duration and AB amplitude parameters were the same. The results suggest that low AB minimum is associated with poor reading. Moreover, phonological awareness was found to correlate with visual AB parameters in the dyslexic group. Overall, the present study provides new methodological insights regarding the assessment of the AB and visual sequential processing in relation to reading disorders.