110 • CHAPTER 4 Attention
Segal points to the painting and asks
Burton’s character, “Who did the paint-
ing?” The nonautistic person follows
the pointing movement from Segal’s
fi nger to the painting to Burton’s face
to await a reply. In contrast, the autis-
tic observer looks elsewhere fi rst, then
back and forth between the pictures.
All of these results indicate that
because of the way autistic people
attend or don’t attend to events as
they unfold in a social situation, they
see different things in the environment
than nonautistic observers. People with
autism look more at things, whereas
nonautistic observers look at other peo-
ple’s actions and especially at their faces
and eyes. Autistic observers therefore
create a mental representation of a situ-
ation that does not include much of the
information that nonautistic observers
usually use in interacting with others.
The eye movement patterns we
have described are probably not the
cause of diffi culties in social situations
for people with autism. Their diffi cul-
ties may have more to do with negative
emotional reactions they experience
when looking at or interacting with
other people. These negative emotions infl uence where they look, which infl uences how
well they can understand what is happening, which in turn makes it even more diffi cult
to function in social situations. Our understanding of autism is still far from complete,
however, and a great deal of research is currently in progress to determine the physi-
ological and behavioral mechanisms involved in autism.- What is overt attention? What is the relation between overt attention and eye
movements? - How are eye movements determined by bottom-up processes, such as physi-
cal characteristics of the stimuli? How are eye movements determined by
top-down processes, such as people’s knowledge about characteristics of the
environment, their interests, and the type of task? - What is covert attention? Location-based attention? Describe the precueing
procedure used by Posner. What does the result of Posner’s experiment indicate
about the effect of attention on information processing? - Describe the Egly precueing experiment. What is the same-object advantage,
and how was it demonstrated by Egly’s experiment? - Describe Treisman’s feature integration theory. What does the theory seek to
explain about perceiving objects? What are the stages of the theory, and at
what point does attention become involved? - What are illusory conjunctions, and what do they demonstrate about feature
analysis? How have illusory conjunction experiments supported the role of
attention in feature analysis? How do experiments with Balint’s syndrome
patients support feature integration theory?
TEST YOURSELF 4.3
● FIGURE 4.41 Scan paths for nonautistic viewers (white path) and autistic viewers
(black path) in response to the picture and dialogue while viewing this shot from
Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Source: A. Klin, W. Jones, R. Schultz, & F. Volkmar, “The Enactive Mind,
or From Actions to Cognition: Lessons From Autism.” The Royal Society, 2003. Published online.)Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.