The present study examined whether atypical visual processing is related to the level of social skills in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Thirty-eight young children with ASD (29 boys, 9 girls) were included. Atypical visual processing was assessed by coding the number of lateral glances and the amount of object grouping behavior on videotaped observations of the ADOS (aged 35 ± 9 months). The level of social skills was measured using the subscale interpersonal relationships of the Vineland SEEC (32 ± 7 months). A negative relationship with a medium effect size was found between lateral glances and interpersonal relationships. Object grouping behavior and interpersonal relationships were not related. This study suggests that visual perception may be a mechanism in the development of interpersonal relationships in ASD, which is in accordance with an embodied approach to social cognition.
Increasing evidence suggests that atypical visual processing and atypical visual behaviors are present in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Autism has been particularly associated with a locally oriented perception (Mottron, Dawson, Soulières, Hubert, & Burack, 2006; see Dakin & Frith, 2005 for a review). Experimental studies indicate that both children and adults with ASD are superior in tasks that require attention to local elements, such as visual search, embedded figures and block design tasks (Dakin and Frith, 2005, Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen, 1997, Kaldy et al., 2011, O’Riordan et al., 2001 and Rondan and Deruelle, 2007). Neurological studies are in line with these results. In children and adults with autism enhanced activity in the visual brain areas has been found in response to high spatial frequency (fine perceptual detail, sharp edges) versus low spatial frequency (general shape and large contour) stimulus information, compared to typically developing and developmentally delayed comparison groups and both for neutral as well as socially relevant stimuli (Deruelle et al., 2004 and Vlamings et al., 2010). In addition to experimental and neurological evidence that demonstrate atypical visual processing, a number of observational studies indicate the presence of atypical visual behaviors in autistic individuals. Ozonoff et al. (2008) and Zwaigenbaum et al. (2005) report that unusual visual exploration, such as prolonged visual inspection and examining objects from odd angles, is common in young children with autism and that these behaviors differentiate these children from typically developing children and children with a developmental disorder. A study by Mottron et al. (2007) identified lateral glances as the most frequent atypical visual exploratory behavior in children with autism. It has been hypothesized that atypical visual behaviors are an adaptive strategy to regulate the overwhelming amount of information that is experienced by people with autism due to their atypical visual processing (Mottron et al., 2007). These behaviors are an example of an epistemic action. Epistemic actions are actions which humans take with the intent of facilitating cognition, for instance first structuring the physical environment before starting to work (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994). Stacking or lining up toys is common in children with autism (Baron-Cohen et al., 2009 and Williams et al., 1999) and may be another epistemic action that these children apply in response to their atypical visual processing (Coulter, 2009). By creating object patterns autistic children may alter the environment in such a way that it provides them with the general shape and larger contour information that they often do not automatically perceive. Adapting the physical environment in this way also reduces the incoming information by creating large patterns. Thus, it may be proposed that both atypical visual behaviors and object grouping behaviors reflect a strategy to regulate the visual information that is atypically processed in autism.
It has been hypothesized that atypical information processing may be a primary deficit of ASD that accounts for both the social and non-social symptoms present in ASD (Mottron et al., 2006). Evidence from longitudinal studies with high risk infants suggests that visual atypicalities differentiate siblings later diagnosed with ASD from other siblings and control (Zwaigenbaum et al., 2005). The notion that atypical visual processing may be related to symptoms of ASD such as social-communicative impairments is consistent with an embodied cognition approach to social understanding. While the Theory of Mind (ToM) theory describes social cognition as a ‘mentalizing’ activity wherein people have to infer other people's intentions (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985), embodied cognition theory would describe social understanding more in terms of a perception-action process that requires being adept at picking up the relevant stimuli in the social environment and adjusting actions rapidly and appropriately to the situation (Gallagher, 2008, Smith and Gasser, 2005 and Thelen, 2008). Many authors have suggested using a more perceptually based embodied, enactive approach to social cognition (Gallagher, 2008, Good, 2007 and De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007).
