Psychological Development and Education ›› 2013, Vol. 29 ›› Issue (6): 571-577.

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Attention Processing Characteristics of Children with Autism：Evidence from the Multiple Objects Tracking Task

MA Yu1,2, ZHANG Xue-min1,3, ZHANG Ying-li1,5, WEI Liu-qing4   

  1. 1. Beijing Normal University, School of Psychology, Beijing 100875, China;
    2. Ideological and Political Education Department, Ningxia Business Technology Institute, Yinchuan 750021, China;
    3. State Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing 100875, China;
    4. Henan Institute of Sport Science, Zhengzhou 450044, China;
    5. Zhuhai Medical Education School, Zhuhai 519020, China
  • Online:2013-11-15 Published:2013-11-15

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Abstract: The present study was intended to investigate the visual attention processing characteristics of children with autism using dynamic visual tracking task. In present study, the typical multiple objects tracking paradigm was adopted,both age and gender matched mid-low Functioning autistic children and normal control group children participated in the same tracking task。There were eight objects in the tracking task,which one, two, three, or four objects were targets and the others were non targets (distractors), the multiple objects tracking accuracy was recorded, and tracking capacity was calculated. The results showed that: (1) Tracking accuracy of autism was significantly lower than the normal control group children from one target to four targets conditions, which indicated autism group had low performance on tracking stability and persistence; (2) when the target number was one, there was no significant difference on the tracking capacity between normal control group children and autistic children; when the number of targets were two, three, and four, the tracking capacity of normal group of children were high than the autistic children significantly. This indicated that autism group was one focus attentional tracking mode and low performance on attentional shift.

Key words: Mid-low Functioning Autistic Children, Multiple Object Tracking, Characteristics of Visual Attention

CLC Number: 

  • B844.1
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