No association between autistic traits and contextual influences on eye-movements during reading
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Cognitive Disorders, Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- autism, autistic traits, eye-movements, reading, sentence context, reading comprehension, semantic processing, central coherence
- Copyright
- © 2014 Caruana et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. No association between autistic traits and contextual influences on eye-movements during reading. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e338v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.338v1
Abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders are claimed to show a local cognitive bias, termed “weak central coherence”, which manifests in a reduced influence of contextual information on linguistic processing. Here, we investigated whether this bias might also be demonstrated by individuals who exhibit sub-clinical levels of autistic traits, as has been found for other aspects of autistic cognition. The eye-movements of 71 university students were monitored as they completed a reading comprehension task. Consistent with previous studies, participants made shorter fixations on words that were highly predicted on the basis of preceding sentence context. However, contrary to the weak central coherence account, this effect was not reduced amongst individuals with high levels of autistic traits, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Further exploratory analyses revealed that participants with high AQ scores fixated longer on words that resolved the meaning of an earlier homograph. However, this was only the case for sentences where the two potential meanings of the homograph result in different pronunciations. The results provide tentative evidence for differences in reading style that are associated with autistic traits, but fail to support the notion of weak central coherence extending into the non-autistic population.
Supplemental Information
Appendixes: Sentence stimuli used in experiment
Appendix A: Sentence stimuli for predictability manipulation.
Appendixes Appendix B: Sentence Stimuli for Ambiguity Manipulation Appendixes Appendix C: Sentences and questions used on trials with comprehension questions