The development of change blindness: children's attentional priorities whilst viewing naturalistic scenes

Change detection of meaningful objects in real-world scenes in adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder

Previous research suggested that adolescents with autism spectrum disorder are better than typically developing children in detecting local, non-social details within complex visual scenes. To better understand these differences, we used the image database by Sareen et al., containing the size and on-screen location information of all changes in the images, in a change blindness paradigm. In this task, an original and a modified real-world scene, separated by a gray blank, alternate repeatedly until observers detect the change. Our results indicated that participants with and without autism spectrum disorder performed similarly when scenes were presented upright, but that only the performance of the typically developing adolescents became worse in the inverted scene condition. In this condition, the correlation between performance and both image difficulty and change predictability was significantly weaker in autism spectrum disorder than in typically developing participants. We suggest that these findings result from a more locally biased search strategy in people with autism spectrum disorder, compared to typically developing participants, in tasks in which the rapid processing of global information does not help to improve change detection performance. Finally, although we found change location, change size, and age to influence participant performance, none of these was directly linked to the observed group-level differences.

Comparison of change detection performance and visual search patterns among children with/without ADHD: Evidence from eye movements

BACKGROUND

ADHD participants showed poorer change detection performance compared to participants without any diagnosis. The difficulty to detect changes in ADHD children might be due to their voluntary eye movement control and attentional deficits.

AIMS

To evaluate change detection performance and visual search patterns of children with ADHD and compare their performances with typically developing (TD) children.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

48 children (nADHD=24, nTD=24) participated (Mage=8 years, 10 months). Flicker paradigm was used to evaluate change detection performance, while eye movements were recorded during the experiment.

RESULTS

Change detection accuracies of TD children were higher compared to ADHD children. TD groups made longer fixations on the changed area and their first fixation duration was also longer than ADHD children which showed that TD children had longer fixation maintenance than ADHD children.

CONCLUSIONS

The change detection performance, which is associated with visual attention and memory, was found to be worse in ADHD children than TD children and these children made shorter fixations on the changed area than TD children. The findings were found to be in line with the difficulty to sustain attention in ADHD children that is necessary for encoding the scene properties and goal-oriented behavior.

The Changing Face of Attentional Development

The field of attentional development has recently undergone a quiet revolution. Attention is no longer being studied as a static gatekeeper of consciousness and action; instead, it is being reconceptualized as a dynamic system that both influences and is influenced by the interactions between individuals and their environments. In this review, we first revisit the conventional understanding of attentional development, showing that a large body of research conducted using a handful of laboratory tasks failed to deliver deep theoretical insights. We then trace the revolution to show how investigators have been changing their research questions in response to this impasse. Finally, we speculate on what the future of attentional development research might look like from this emerging dynamic perspective.

Comparison of interstimulus intervals on change detection in nondriving and driving scenarios

Change detection across disruptions of visual scenes is typically studied using brief durations of the interstimulus interval (ISI) (i.e., up to 300 ms). We investigated change detection across durations that approximate longer, voluntary glances away from a visual scene (i.e., 500-2,000 ms), which are often actualized in driving situations. Experiment 1 found that in nondriving scenarios, change detection performance, as measured by accuracy and response time, decreased as ISI increased. Experiment 2 found that in driving scenarios, change detection for plausible changes also decreased as the ISI increased, but there was no similar decrease in performance for implausible changes. Both Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the necessary number of exposures to the change decreased as ISIs approximated voluntary glances, suggesting that change detection strategies may be modified at longer ISI durations.

Self-relevance does not moderate choice blindness in adolescents and children

In two experiments we tested the choice blindness phenomenon in adolescents aged 11-16 years (Experiment 1, N = 87) and children aged 7-10 years (Experiment 2, N = 117) for the first time. Analogous to previously reported findings with adult participants, we expected to replicate the robust effect in these age groups. Furthermore, we investigated the hypothesis that self-relevance of choices, defined as the extent to which the self is implicated in a choice, moderates the choice blindness effect in adolescents and children. To this end, we directly compared high and low self-relevance conditions. As expected, the choice blindness effect was robust across age groups. Little support was found for the idea that self-relevance moderates the choice blindness effect. Specifically, no effect of self-relevance on choice blindness was found in adolescents, while the findings in the child sample were inconsistent. Different possible interpretations of the results as well as the possible role of ambiguity for the choice blindness effect are discussed.

Change blindness in children with ADHD: a selective impairment in visual search?

OBJECTIVE

This study evaluated change blindness and visual search efficiency in children with ADHD in searching for central and marginal changes.

METHOD

A total of 36 drug-naïve children (18 ADHD/18 controls) performed a flicker task that included changes in objects of central or marginal interest. The task required observers to search for a change until they detected it.

RESULTS

Children with ADHD performed more slowly and less accurately than did typically developing children, specifically in detecting marginal-interest changes.

CONCLUSION

In contrast to more standard visual search tasks, flicker tasks seem to be more sensitive to highlight focused attention deficits in children diagnosed with ADHD. Concretely, ADHD attentional deficits were more apparent when the task involved serial top-down strategies.

Detecting social and non-social changes in natural scenes: performance of children with and without autism spectrum disorders and typical adults

We probed differences in the ability to detect and interpret social cues in adults and in children and young adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by investigating the effect of various social and non-social contexts on the visual exploration of pictures of natural scenes. Children and adolescents relied more on social referencing cues in the scene as compared to adults, and in the presence of such cues, were less able to use other kinds of cues. Typically developing children and adolescents were no better than those with ASD at detecting changes within the various social contexts. Results suggest children and adolescents with ASD use relevant social cues while searching a scene just as typical children do.

Time crawls: the temporal resolution of infants' visual attention

Conscious visual perception of the constantly changing environment is one of the brain's most critical functions. In virtually every moment of every daily activity, the visual system is confronted with the task of accurately representing and interpreting scenes that change rapidly over time. Adults can judge the identity and order of changing images presented at a rate of up to 10 Hz (~50 ms per image); this limit reflects a finite temporal resolution of attention. In the research reported here, although 6- to 15-month-old infants could detect the presence of rapid flicker without difficulty, their ability to segment individual alternating states within the flicker was severely limited: Fifteen-month-old infants had a temporal resolution of attention approximately one order of magnitude lower than that of adults (~1 Hz). Coarse temporal resolution constrains how infants perceive and utilize dynamic visual information and may play a role in the visual processing deficits found in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Deficits in adults with autism spectrum disorders when processing multiple objects in dynamic scenes

People with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) process visual information in a manner that is distinct from typically developing individuals. They may be less sensitive to people's goals and, more generally, focus on visual details instead of the entire scene. To examine these differences, people with and without ASD were asked to detect changes in dynamic scenes with multiple elements. Participants viewed a brief video of a person or an inanimate object (the "figure") moving from one object to another; after a delay, they reported whether a second video was the same or different. Possible changes included the figure, the object the figure was moving from, or the object the figure was moving toward (the "goal"). We hypothesized that individuals with ASD would be less sensitive to changes in scenes with people, particularly elements that might be the person's goal. Alternately, people with ASD might attend to fewer elements regardless of whether the scene included a person. Our results indicate that, like controls, people with ASD noticed a change in the "goal" object at the end of a person's movement more often than the object at the start. However, the group with ASD did not undergo the developmental improvement that was evident typically when detecting changes in both the start and end objects. This atypical development led to deficits in adults with ASD that were not specific to scenes with people or to "goals." Improvements in visual processing that underlie mature representation of scenes may not occur in ASD, suggesting that late developing brain processes are affected.