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Updated: Jun 7, 2026

Comparing Eye-tracking Data of Children with High-functioning ASD, Comorbid ADHD, and of a Control Watching Social Videos
Published on: December 7, 2018
Do high-functioning people with autism spectrum disorder spontaneously use event knowledge to selectively attend to
Eva Loth1, Juan Carlós Gómez, Francesca Happé
1MRC Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AF, UK. eva.loth@kcl.ac.uk
Abstract:
This study combined an event schema approach with top-down processing perspectives to investigate whether high-functioning children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) spontaneously attend to and remember context-relevant aspects of scenes. Participants read one story of story-pairs (e.g., burglary or tea party). They then inspected a scene (living room) of which some objects were relevant in that context, irrelevant (related to the non-emphasized event) or neutral (scene-schema related). During immediate and delayed recall, only the (TD) groups selectively recalled context-relevant objects, and significantly more context-relevant objects than the ASD groups. Gaze-tracking suggests that one factor in these memory differences may be diminished top-down effects of event schemas on initial attention (first ten fixations) to relevant items in ASD.
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