Attention Capture by Trains and Faces in Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder

This study examined involuntary capture of attention, overt attention, and stimulus valence and arousal ratings, all factors that can contribute to potential attentional biases to face and train objects in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the visual domain, faces are particularly captivating, and are thought to have a 'special status' in the attentional system. Recent research suggests that similar attentional biases may exist for other classes of objects (e.g. birds), providing support for the role of exposure in attention prioritization. This research aimed to determine whether other classes of objects (i.e. trains) can capture attention similarly to what has been reported for faces. Children (6-14 years old) with and without ASD performed a visual search task where they indicated whether a target butterfly appeared amongst an array of face, train, and neutral distractors while their eye-movements were tracked. Content type is behavioural data and eye-tracking data. Software used was IBM SPSS Statistics 24.0. This dataset was originally deposited in the Simon Fraser University institutional repository.