Children with high-functioning autism (HFA) frequently exhibit achievement difficulties, especially in the areas of reading comprehension and written expression. Social attention impairment, a symptom of autism, may play a critical role in the learning difficulties of these children. Social attention impairment in autism encompasses three related problem domains—joint attention, social orienting, and attention to faces. To engage effectively in social learning within a classroom, children must be motivated and readily able to attend to other people to share and receive meaningful information. The complex social and cognitive contexts of classrooms, in which social attention must be regulated in interaction with multiple social partners, makes social learning even more complicated for school-aged children with autism.
This project will apply new virtual reality technology to create visual and auditory settings that emulate complex social environments such as classrooms. Using such technology, researchers will examine the following questions: (1) Will students with autism display significant impairments in the development of social attention skills, and will individual differences in social attention be associated with measures of cognitive processes involved in learning, academic achievement (reading comprehension, written and oral expression, and mathematics), and social outcomes? (2) Will impairment in social attention make a unique contribution to processes that may inhibit learning, academic success, and social success in students with autism? (3) Will the presence of symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is often co-morbid with autism, mediate or moderate the impact of social attention on learning and development in students with autism? (4) Will social attention be malleable, with practice in social attention tasks leading to improved performance on those tasks for students with autism?
This research team will investigate social attention in children with autism, and the relation of social attention to learning, academic achievement, and social outcomes, by collecting data directly from students with autism and their parents and teachers. Children and their parents will visit a university-based laboratory for baseline data collection on all standardized child measures, standardized parent measures, and child measures of social attention and learning. Teachers will complete standardized measures through the mail. Primary teachers will be contacted for each elementary school student and two teachers will be contacted for middle and high school students (one English or Social Studies teacher, one Math or Science teacher). Follow-up data will be collected twice over the next 2.5 years. An independent sample of students with HFA will be randomly assigned to a "training" group (practice social attention using virtual reality tasks) or a control group.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
