By word of mouth: pilot test computerized attention training to improve social attention in autism

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder with diagnoses quickly on the rise. The disorder exhibits several deficits, particularly the processing of social information. Research suggests that individuals with ASD have an irregular gaze pattern and may glean social information from the mouth instead of the eyes. To this end, this thesis used an altered dot-probe task as an attention training mechanism for increasing the degree to which individuals with ASD gaze at the mouth. A descriptive analysis and paired sample t-tests shows that the means for identifying the probe during the dot probe task did decrease with accuracy remaining stable. Means on pre and post measures depict trends of increased social competence. Correlations between changes scores for reaction time and pre and post measures, however; do not support this claim. The study would need to be replicated with a larger sample to further explore this contradiction.