ATTENTIONAL GUIDANCE TOWARDS AUDIOVISUALSYNCHRONY IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUMDISORDER (ASD): AN EYE TRACKING STUDY

In recent years, the study of alterations in sensorimotor and perceptual development in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has opened interesting avenues of empirical inquiry and has allowed the emergence of new explanatory hypotheses regarding the causal factors underlying the alterations present in this disorder. In this line of research, this paper is based on an interest in studying the relationship between the development of intersensory perception and that of social cognition in ASD. Specifi cally, the main objective has been to compare, by means of eye-tracking technology, attentional orientation and recognition of audiovisual synchrony (through linguistic judgment) of children with ASD and children with typical development (TD), in experimental tasks with dynamic stimuli (video clips) with social and non-social content, in which audiovisual temporal synchrony is experimentally manipulated. As a methodological strategy, three experiments have been designed focused on examining the recognition of audiovisual synchrony ) in speech; ) in object sounds and ) in point-light stimuli (Point Light Display [PLD]) that simulate human movement and interactions. The differences presented in the two groups were examined in relation to three variables: ) Number of fi xations on the synchronous stimulus; ) time spent looking at the synchronous stimulus; ) time elapsed until the synchronous stimulus was identifi ed by means of verbal report. The partial results associated with each of the groups and in each of the implemented experiments are presented. This research contributes to the knowledge of the characteristics of intersensory processing in ASD and the relationship that this has with the social competence indices of each group, recorded by means of standardized tests. The implications for evaluation and intervention that the fi ndings obtained may have are explored in depth.