Change blindness is the challenge by individuals to find or detect a difference between the two pictures when there is a successive presentation and a brief obstruction between them. Detection requires attention at that site. Various studies have investigated the different change blindness in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Some have established that individuals with ASD may find it hard to adapt to changes in the social stimuli for detection and find it more comfortable to detect the changes in social stimuli. This paper analyses five major peer-reviewed articles that describe the change in blindness and autism in adolescents and children and concludes with a synthesis of the articles.
Summary of the Articles
In the first article by De Verdier, K., Fernell, E., & Ek, U. (2019), the authors establish that Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is commonly found in children and adolescents with congenital blindness. The sophisticated combination of the two disabilities typically brings various difficulties for a family. The research investigated parents' experiences in having a child or children with blindness and ASD, their special attention and support, needs, and the experiences they faced. The study conducted interviews with eight parents who represented six families. The eight parents reiterated that professionals and experts in blind children’s growth and ASD should perform the diagnostic processes. The fragmentation of the support seemed to lack correspondence to the families’ needs. The study outcomes indicated that there should be a need to have national guidelines to guarantee a coordinated and supportive approach to such families.
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Smith & Milne (2010) affirms that the idea of change blindness shows that a small number of items in the visual scene can be attended to at a certain point. It has been shown that people with autism tend to give much of their attention to less contextually appropriate elements of the visual scene, have a higher level of perceptual bias and understand things that observers typically disregard. In this study, the authors examined the change blindness idea in autism by informing the respondents to observe the continuity problems deliberately incorporated in a summarized film. There were variations of the continuity errors, whether involving the social or non-social elements. The participants for this study were 30 in total, with 15 autistic adolescents and 15 with typically developing (TD) controls. The study established that the participants with ASD detected considerable errors than the TD respondents. The two groups found more errors about central instead of marginal elements of the scene despite having a more significant impact on the TD individuals. The cases of social or non-social errors had no significant differences by either team of the participants. The article concluded that there is an improved awareness of visual scenes for ASD. The outcomes of this study can reflect a more superior top-down visual search control for autism, high perceptual roles, or ineffective filtering of visual ideas for ASD.
Hochhauser Aran & Grynszpan (2018) assessed the visual attention of adolescents with ASD by implementing the blindness design. The article used 25 participants aged between 12 to 18, all with ASD, and another sample of 25 with typically developing (TD) adolescents to view 36 pairs of real-world pictures in digital form. A flicker paradigm was presented to display each pair of the images. In this case, a certain item appeared and disappeared alternately. The item or product with was a central or a marginal form at the scene. The response periods for change detection were established and then compared among the two teams. It was more difficult to detect the marginal details than for the central details of the scenes in the two groups. Regardless. The response periods for the ASD team were quite lower than the TD groups. The outcomes of this study challenge the hypothesis of high-level visual detection for ASD.
Fletcher‐Watson et al. (2012) define change blindness as the challenge witnessed by most individuals in identifying a difference between two images when they are successively presented with a concise change or interruption between. Detection requires attention at the site. Various kinds of researches have examined the concept of change blindness in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Most studies have established that individuals with ASD can find changes in the social stimuli more challenging to detect and detect non-social stimuli after comparing the participants. However, others have shown contrasting outcomes in particular. The authors suggest that there should be consistent methodologies to help in the comprehension of change blindness and the attentional procedures in ASD. In this study, the authors replicated a change blindness study that was previously initiated with the typically developing (TD) children and adolescents with ASD. The outcomes of this study show that the attenuated change blindness for children with ASD in the non-social stimuli is relative to the TD norms. The results of this work can be understood alongside other research as possible indicators of a sophisticated association between various influences on attention after some time.
Hochhauser, Aran & Grynszpan (2021) ascertain that social interaction primarily involves the allocation of attention to the appropriate stimuli. Therefore, the change perception calls for attention; however, studies indicate that social impairment in individuals with the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) takes place at the attentional phase with regards to social cognition. In this study, the authors used 44 adolescents as participants for their research. Half of the participants had autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and the other half had typical development (TD). The two groups took part in two experiments. In the first case, a change blindness framework was used to investigate attention using the detection of the changed items and the central and marginal interest levels when examining the images of the daily scenarios. The response times were compared using the eye-tracking method. Furthermore, the fixation times on the changes were also measured by the eye-tracking approach. The authors showed that the ASD participants had slower response times and the first fixation compared to the TD participants. The TD participants hand longer fixation of the marginal items than the central interest levels. Concisely, using this social film method, the authors affirmed that the respondents with ASD had a slow orientation of their gazes on a character's face and stared at the speaking figures for fewer periods than the TD participants. The outcomes of this study are significant and correlate directly with the implementation of the mental verbs for narration, and less time is taken focusing on the marginal items in a CB experiment. In summary, the outcomes showed that the reduced speed in processing items among adolescents with ASD is linked to an improved understanding of the local aspects. In a clinical perception, the results of this work show that teaching methods such as the cognitive cues for processing of the social context effects can be beneficial to people with ASD.
Syntheses and Critique
Across the five studies, the authors conclude that blindness is a rare condition in this era and time. However, the studies affirm that children with blindness are at great risk of extra development disorders. The blame on blindness should not entirely be on the development delays or challenges. The three studies claim that the development process of a child should be evaluated closely from the start to facilitate effective interventions and assessment when the need arises. The findings from the five studies have an implication on the presumption that experts should execute clinical examination in the children with blindness development to guarantee an effective and appropriate evaluation of the processes. Additionally, ASD and blindness are regarded as life-long challenges. As a result, the studies suggest that the rehabilitation programs should incorporate a life-long focus. In the studies by Fletcher‐Watson et al. (2012), De Verdier, K., Fernell, E., & Ek, U. (2019), and Hochhauser, Aran & Grynszpan (2021), there was a revelation that parents were worried about their children’s conditions for future life and school work. Therefore, the studies suggested that there should be early training programs to enhance independence and ensure that young children use their abilities and talents and an early stage. The studies suggested a customized program for such children in a continuous process. For this, the authors call for the production of the national guidelines to guarantee a tailored and well-planned support system, with high collaboration between various actors in a support system for such children with special needs.
Two studies, in particular, Hochhauser Aran & Grynszpan (2018) and Smith & Milne (2010), conducted studies that gave experimental evidence suggesting that the reduced change blindness among youths and children with the autism spectrum condition can happen when observing the daily activities in life. The authors highlighted that the high detection of changes for ASD was feasible for items in the scenes, and people are typically not interested in attending to and remember. These studies showed that there was an insignificant level in detecting the location changes in a marginal interest situation than the control groups. Cumulatively, the outcomes of these two results have consistency with the theories of improved local details and reduction of processing for the ASD. The two cases show that the anecdotal reports that individuals with the ASC have differences in their attention regarding minor details in a setting that seems insignificant to other people.
Even though the five studies found the same results regarding change blindness and autism in adolescents and children, they each recruited samples with fewer than 50 participants, each of which had half of the population with change blindness and autism and the other as the control group. Future studies should recruit a more diverse sample representative of the broader autism community, not only the adolescents and children. Furthermore, the samples were small to make a whole representation of the entire population of people with change blindness and autism.
The limitation of the present research is the implementation of the longer latencies to display than the timings executed in various studies for change blindness. The studies incorporated longer tendencies because the other studies had shown that the comparable change blindness impacts could be found in the shorter and longer display times, such as the latencies implemented in the studies herein. Since individuals with ASD have slower responses than their respective controls and encounter more challenges with decision-making, this study disadvantaged such people. Even though longer latencies could aid in simplifying the duties and reducing their cognitive needs, it could affect their view of pictures and detection of changes in a manner that favors the ones with ASD. However, other studies have reported the same findings as the current studies examined in this work of using shorter display timings. Additional research is needed to compare the various methodologies to understand the impacts of such factors on change detection in ASD.
The other limitation of these studies is that they only included ASD participants in their adolescent stages or younger. Generally, these outcomes about the reduced change blindness items for the marginal interest should not be assumed to be true for other individuals with ASD. Consequently, further results should be used to examine whether these outcomes would be plausible for different groups with autism, including females and older adults. Future studies ought to use different measures of gaze when conducting their research. The approach will be critical in investigating the attention of individuals with and without ASD. The five studies found evidence of reduced change blindness in autism that shows the superiority in change detection for the items in a scene with less saliency.
The qualitative approach of these studies on a small scale makes it necessary to talk about the limitations. The outcomes of the studies reflect the subjective experiences of the respective samples selected in a strategic manner. With the small number of children with blindness ASD, the number of children who could be available for the study was limited, hence choosing the sampling. The studies could not include all of these children in the research for practical purposes. As a result, the selection of the participants was to reflect the heterogeneity of the whole population instead of using a random approach for elimination that risks over-representation about some variables.
References
De Verdier, K., Fernell, E., & Ek, U. (2019). Blindness and Autism: Parents’ Perspectives on Diagnostic Challenges, Support Needs and Support Provision. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1-10. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-019-03944-y
Fletcher‐Watson, S., Leekam, S. R., Connolly, B., Collis, J. M., Findlay, J. M., McConachie, H., & Rodgers, J. (2012). Attenuation of change blindness in children with autism spectrum disorders. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(3), 446-458. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02054.x
Hochhauser, M., Aran, A., & Grynszpan, O. (2018). How Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Spontaneously Attend to Real-World Scenes: Use of a Change Blindness Paradigm. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 48(2), 502-510. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-017-3343-6
Hochhauser, M., Aran, A., & Grynszpan, O. (2021). Investigating attention in young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using change blindness and eye tracking. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 84, 101771. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2021.101771
Smith, H., & Milne, E. (2010). Reduced change blindness suggests enhanced attention to detail in individuals with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 50(3), 300-306. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.01957.x
