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The Shell Game: Investigating Spontaneous Response to Gaze Cueing of Attention in Children with High Functioning Autism
No full textBackground:
Deficits in joint attention development characterize autism and are thought to hinder social development and early language acquisition (Mundy & Burnette, 2005), therefore response to gaze cueing -the ability to shift visual attention in response to the observed eye gaze direction of another person- has been investigated in autism using different paradigms: Posner-style gaze-cueing tests demonstrated that purely reflexive perceptual aspects are intact even in very young children with autism (Chawarska et al., 2003; Swettenham et al. 2003) while performance in explicit gaze direction detection judgment tasks is impaired in older ones (Riby & Doherty 2009). However the use of verbally demanding tasks and explicit judgments about gaze-direction can be problematic when testing young children with autism.
Objectives:
We aimed to evaluate spontaneous response to gaze cueing of attention in young children with autism by means of an experimental stimulus in which an implicit goal elicits spontaneous response to gaze-cueing, while free visual explorations of the stimuli are recorded with an eye tracker.
Methods:
18 children with high-functioning autism (mean age 6.4 years, SD 2.1) and 18 age-matched controls (mean age 6.3 years, SD 1.10) participated. Participants were simply instructed to look at the videos presented with a Tobii-T60 eye-tracker. Each child saw 2 demonstrations and 2 test videos depicting an actor hiding an object under one of two identical opaque glasses, rotating them and then looking laterally for three times (without head turn) towards the glass that covered the object, before lifting it up. The hiding process was either visible (2 demonstrations) or hidden behind a screen (2 tests) thus in the demonstrations the observer could ignore the gaze-cue in order to find the object, while in the experimental conditions the gaze cue was the only visible feature leading to it. Statistical analysis compared fixations to key areas of the stimuli, namely Eyes, Gaze-Target and Non-Gaze-Target, qualitative analysis on gaze patterns evaluated response to gaze cueing.
Results:
The group comparison found statistically significant differences in attention towards the Gaze Target: Children with autism showed shorter fixations on the Gaze Target (p= 0.035) and spent lower time exploring it (p= 0.054). The qualitative analysis of the visual fixation patterns confirmed that children with autism as a group had a reduced tendency to follow the gaze cue (37% accuracy ), compared to typical controls (82% accuracy). Finally, paired samples t-tests within groups showed that control children made a significantly higher number of fixations to the Target Vs the Non Target (p=0.007), spent a significantly higher time on the Target rather than on the Non Target (p= 0.002) and made longer fixations to it (p<0.001) while no statistically significant differences were found for children with autism suggesting an inefficient differentiation between Target and Non target.
Conclusions:
Our data suggest that even though children with autism were less efficient than controls in perceiving and flexibly following the eye gaze cue they showed considerable residual gaze following abilities. Implications for treatment and further research will be discussed
Esperienze di generalizzazione cartografica automatica in Italia: tecniche e risultati del progetto CARGEN
No full textAttention toward Social and Non-Social Stimuli in Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Paired Preference Eye-Tracking Study
Full text linkDifferent dimensions of visual attention to social (human faces) and non-social stimuli (objects) were assessed in 19 preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and 19 typically developing (TD) age, gender, and IQ-matched controls through an original paired preference eye-tracking paradigm. The present study found a significantly reduced attentional bias toward human faces in children with ASD compared to TD controls. The analysis of the total fixation time showed a significantly reduced preference for faces in children with ASD compared to TD children. Moreover, while TD children showed a significant preference for the face over the object, children in the ASD group observed the two paired pictures for a similar amount of time, thus showing no preference. Besides, children with ASD paid significantly more sustained attention to the objects than TD children. Children in the TD group paid greater sustained attention to the faces over the objects, while children in the ASD group did not differentiate between objects and faces. Finally, an age effect was found in ASD, as younger children in the group tended to prefer objects and to show more sustained attention towards them. Overall, these findings add to the literature on anomalies in attention toward social and non-social stimuli in young children with ASD compared to their TD counterparts. These results are discussed in the light of previous studies and suggest possible directions for future research
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Impaired representational gaze following in children with autism spectrum disorder
No full textUsing eye-tracking methodology, we compared spontaneous gaze following in young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (mean age 5.8 years) to that of typically developing children (mean age 5.7 years). Participants saw videos in which the position of a hidden object was either perceptually visible or was only represented in another person's mind. The findings indicate that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder were significantly less accurate in gaze following and observed the attended object for less time than typically developing children only in the Representational Condition. These results show that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are responsive to gaze as a perceptual cue although they ignore its representational meaning
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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