RESUMEN
The extant literature aimed at characterizing attentional capability in autistics has presented inconsistent findings. This inconsistency and uncertainty may be the product of different theoretical and methodological approaches used to define attention in autism. In the current study, we investigate whether the allocation of attentional resources to task demands, and attention resource capacity, differs between autistics with no comorbid attention-deficit diagnosis (n = 55) and age-matched neurotypicals (n = 55). We compared differences in capacity and the allocation of resources by manipulating attentional load in a Multiple Object-Tracking (MOT) task, a robust, versatile, and ecological measure of selective, sustained, and distributed attention. While autistics demonstrated lower MOT performance, this difference disappeared when we accounted for fluid reasoning intelligence. Additionally, the similarity in the trend of MOT performance at increasing levels of attentional load between autistics and neurotypicals suggests no differences in the allocation of attentional resources to task demands. Taken together, our study suggests that higher-order cognitive abilities, such as intelligence, should be considered when characterizing attention across the autistic population in research. Similarly, our findings highlight the importance of considering cognitive competence when assessing attentional capabilities in autistic individuals, which could have significant implications for clinical diagnosis, treatment, and support.
RESUMEN
Expression in musical performance is largely communicated by the manner in which a piece is played; interpretive aspects that supplement the written score. In piano performance, timing and amplitude are the principal parameters the performer can vary. We examined the way in which such variation serves to communicate emotion by manipulating timing and amplitude in performances of classical piano pieces. Over three experiments, listeners rated the emotional expressivity of performances and their manipulated versions. In Experiments 1 and 2, timing and amplitude information were covaried; judgments were monotonically decreasing with performance variability, demonstrating that the rank ordering of acoustical manipulations was captured by participants' responses. Further, participants' judgments formed an S-shaped (sigmoidal) function in which greater sensitivity was seen for musical manipulations in the middle of the range than at the extremes. In Experiment 3, timing and amplitude were manipulated independently; timing variation was found to provide more expressive information than did amplitude. Across all three experiments, listeners demonstrated sensitivity to the expressive cues we manipulated, with sensitivity increasing as a function of musical experience.
Asunto(s)
Formación de Concepto , Emociones , Música/psicología , Estimulación Acústica , Adolescente , Adulto , Comprensión , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Valores de Referencia , Adulto JovenRESUMEN
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are impaired in understanding the emotional undertones of speech, many of which are communicated through prosody. Musical performance also employs a form of prosody to communicate emotion, and the goal of this study was to examine the ability of adolescents with ASD to understand musical emotion. We designed an experiment in which each musical stimulus served as its own control while we varied the emotional expressivity by manipulating timing and amplitude variation. We asked children and adolescents with ASD and matched controls as well as individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) to rate how emotional these excerpts sounded. Results show that children and adolescents with ASD are impaired relative to matched controls and individuals with WS at judging the difference in emotionality among the expressivity levels. Implications for theories of emotion in autism are discussed in light of these findings.