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Updated: Jul 27, 2026

Testing Sensory and Multisensory Function in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
09:13

Testing Sensory and Multisensory Function in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Published on: April 22, 2015

Social and cardiac responses of young children with autism

Marian Sigman1, Cheryl Dissanayake, Rosalie Corona

  • 1Department of Psychiatry, University of California at Los Angles, School of Medicine, 90095-1752, USA.

Autism : the International Journal of Research and Practice
|July 9, 2003
PubMed

Insights

Children with autism showed similar attention to videos as other developmental disability groups. Contrary to expectations, increased arousal was not observed in social situations, suggesting alternative explanations for social attention differences.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Neurodevelopmental Disorders
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder Research

Background:

  • Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit reduced social attention.
  • Previous theories suggested heightened arousal in social situations might explain this.
  • This study investigated physiological and behavioral responses in children with ASD during social stimuli exposure.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To compare the attention and heart rate responses of children with autism to those with other developmental disabilities.
  • To examine whether increased arousal underlies the social attention differences in children with autism.
  • To explore alternative explanations for social attention deficits in autism.

Main Methods:

  • Compared 22 children with autism and 22 with other developmental disabilities.
  • Monitored behavioral attention and heart rate responses while participants watched videos of a baby playing or crying.
  • Measured heart rate changes during stranger interaction and mother separation as controls.

Main Results:

  • Children with autism demonstrated comparable attention to videos as the control group.
  • Both groups exhibited heart rate slowing, not increased arousal, when viewing the crying baby video.
  • No significant heart rate changes were observed during stranger interaction or separation from mothers.

Conclusions:

  • The findings challenge the arousal-based explanation for reduced social attention in autism.
  • Children with autism are as attentive to social stimuli as typically developing peers in certain contexts.
  • Alternative hypotheses should be considered to understand social attention differences in autism spectrum disorder.

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