Project Description:
The mission of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) is to improve the diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders by driving, catalyzing and funding research of the greatest quality and relevance.
To this end, we solicit applications for SFARI Simons Simplex Collection (SSC) Awards from individuals who will conduct bold, imaginative, rigorous and relevant research. Innovative high-risk, high-impact proposals are encouraged.
Research on attention in individuals with autism spectrum disorders has produced a diverse and often contradictory set of findings. Some studies have demonstrated deficits in attention, but others have found no difference or even superior attentional performance in people with autism.
Yuhong Jiang and her colleagues aim to resolve these inconsistencies by focusing on a type of attention that is most likely to be affected in autism spectrum disorders. They plan to test the hypothesis that stimulus-driven attention  which results from learning which stimuli are potentially informative and hence priority targets for attention  is most affected in autism, whereas self-driven (top-down) attention is largely unchanged.
Jiang and her team plan to test adolescents and adults with autism and healthy controls in an attention-demanding visual search task, in order to understand how they learn to tune their attention. In the task, participants look at an array of objects to find a designated target object. Unbeknownst to them, the target object is more likely to appear in certain parts of the screen than in others. Preliminary data show that typically developing adults are sensitive to this manipulation and gradually tune attention toward the rich locations. However, the pace of learning varies from person to person.
The researchers also aim to test how individuals adapt to changes in the visual environment. After training with unevenly distributed displays, for example, participants could be tested with displays in which the target object is evenly distributed. In another study, the target object becomes less likely to appear in the previous locations and more likely to appear in other locations. The results may reveal the pace at which individuals with autism learn to attend to the visual environment, how they retain the learning after training and how they adapt to changes in the environment.
