Affective Salience Influences Looking Preference for Social Elements during Interactive Play Scenes in Young Children with Autism

In typically developing children, social elements within natural scenes substantially bias allocation of attention (Chevallier et al., 2012). Furthermore, affective salience and positive affect act as additional cues to drive attention and engagement within complex scenes (Pool 2016). Reduced preference for social stimuli has been reported in autism and related to social learning impairment (Dawson 2012; Chita-Tegmark 2016). Eye-tracking studies using dynamic social stimuli, indicated that children with autism specifically fail to attend to social cues in more naturalistic conditions (Chawarska et al., 2012; Chevallier et al., 2015). However, none of these studies have systematically manipulated the level of emotional salience of social cues, and tested its impact on the looking patterns for natural interaction scenes. Objectives:To test, using an eye-tracking experiment, whether a) children with and without autism attend equivalently to videos of naturalistic interactive play; b) affective salience and positive affect are able to modulate attention to social-related elements of interactive play scenes equivalently in children with and without autism.