The Influence of Irrelevant Visual Distractors on Eye Movement Control in Chinese Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from the Remote Distractor Paradigm

Attentional Engagement and Disengagement Differences for Circumscribed Interest Objects in Young Chinese Children with Autism

The current study aimed to investigate attentional processing differences for circumscribed interest (CI) and non-CI objects in young Chinese children with autism spectrum condition (ASC) and typically developing (TD) controls. In Experiment 1, a visual preference task explored attentional allocation to cartoon CI and non-CI materials between the two groups. We found that ASC children (n = 22, 4.95 ± 0.59 years) exhibited a preference for CI-related objects compared to non-CI objects, and this effect was absent in the TD children (n = 22, 5.14 ± 0.44 years). Experiment 2 utilized the traditional gap-overlap paradigm (GOP) to investigate attentional disengagement from CI or non-CI items in both groups (ASC: n = 20, 5.92 ± 1.13 years; TD: n = 25, 5.77 ± 0.77 years). There were no group or stimulus interactions in this study. Experiment 3 adopted a modified GOP (MGOP) to further explore disengagement in the two groups (ASC: n = 20, 5.54 ± 0.95 years; TD: n = 24, 5.75 ± 0.52 years), and the results suggested that exogenous disengagement performance was preserved in the ASC group, but the children with ASC exhibited increased endogenous attentional disengagement compared to TD peers. Moreover, endogenous disengagement was influenced further in the presence of CI-related objects in the ASC children. The current results have implications for understanding how the nature of engagement and disengagement processes can contribute to differences in the development of core cognitive skills in young children with ASC.

A simultaneous electroencephalography and eye-tracking dataset in elite athletes during alertness and concentration tasks

The dataset of simultaneous 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG) and high-speed eye-tracking (ET) recordings was collected from 31 professional athletes and 43 college students during alertness behavior task (ABT) and concentration cognitive task (CCT). The CCT experiment lasting 1-2 hours included five sessions for groups of the Shooting, Archery and Modern Pentathlon elite athletes and the controls. Concentration targets included shooting target and combination target with or without 24 different directions of visual distractors and 2 types of music distractors. Meditation and Schulte Grid trainings were done as interventions. Analysis of the dataset aimed to extract effective biological markers of eye movement and EEG that can assess the concentration level of talented athletes compared with same-aged controls. Moreover, this dataset is useful for the research of related visual brain-computer interfaces.

The influence of emotional face distractors on attentional orienting in Chinese children with autism spectrum disorder

The current study examined how emotional faces impact on attentional control at both involuntary and voluntary levels in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A non-face single target was either presented in isolation or synchronously with emotional face distractors namely angry, happy and neutral faces. ASD and typically developing children made more erroneous saccades towards emotional distractors relative to neutral distractors in parafoveal and peripheral conditions. Remote distractor effects were observed on saccade latency in both groups regardless of distractor type, whereby time taken to initiate an eye movement to the target was longest in central distractor conditions, followed by parafoveal and peripheral distractor conditions. The remote distractor effect was greater for angry faces compared to happy faces in the ASD group. Proportions of failed disengagement trials from central distractors, for the first saccade, were higher in the angry distractor condition compared with the other two distractor conditions in ASD, and this effect was absent for the typical group. Eye movement results suggest difficulties in disengaging from fixated angry faces in ASD. Atypical disengagement from angry faces at the voluntary level could have consequences for the development of higher-level socio-communicative skills in ASD.