为了考察自闭症谱系障碍(autismspectrumdisorder,ASD)儿童对不同情绪面孔的觉察和加工情况,设计两个眼动实验任务,要求14名7—10岁ASD儿童和20名同年龄正常儿童观看图片。实验一采用将情绪面孔嵌入风景图片中引起语义不一致的刺激;实验二采用含有情绪面孔的无意义背景乱序图片刺激。结果发现:(1)ASD儿童对不同情绪面孔的觉察时间都显著长于正常儿童;(2)与正常儿童一样,ASD儿童表现出对恐惧面孔的注意偏向;(3)实验二中,ASD儿童对不同情绪面孔内部特征区的注意分配与正常儿童不同;正常儿童能注意最能展示该类情绪特征信息的区域,如恐惧的眼睛、愉快的嘴巴,而ASD儿童时三类情绪面孔特征区的注意分配方式相似;(4)两个实验条件下,ASD者对不同情绪面孔的觉察、加工模式与正常儿童相似。
Eye movements while watching pictures of 14 ASD (autism spectrum disorder) children and 20 typically developed children were monitored in two experiments to investigate the nature of emotional faces detection and processing of ASD individuals. In Experiment 1, the semantic inconsistency stimuli were created by embedding emotional faces (neutral, fear, or happy) into outdoor scenes. The scrambled pictures of a person with different expressions (neutral, fear, or happy) were presented in Experiment 2. The results showed: (1) ASD individuals needed longer time to detect the emotion faces than normal controls consistently across experiments. (2) An attentional bias to the fearful faces was observed in both ASD and control groups. (3) In Experiment 2, children with ASD performed an abnormal attentional allocation pattern to feature areas of the different emotional faces. The typically developing children showed more focus on the areas which are thought to display the most characteristic changes and convey the most important information for the different facial expressions, such as the eyes with fear or the mouth with happy, however the ASD group showed a similar pattern on the distribution of looks on three emotional faces. (4) Children with ASD showed a similar pattern to the typically developed children while detecting and processing emotional faces.