Left visual field superiority of children with autism spectrum disorder / 中国学校卫生

ABSTRACT

Objective@#To explore the impairments of the left visual field (LVF) superiority among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), for further understanding of the attentional mechanism of social disturbance in ASD.@*Methods@#The mixed design for repeated measured data was used. The case group was consisted of 105 ASD children enrolled from the rehabilitation agencies in Tianjin from Sept. 2016 to Dec. 2019; and 105 typically developed children were enrolled from Tianjin as the control group by matching the chronological age and gender distribution. The preferential looking paradigm was used to explore the LVF superiority by eye tracking system. Fixation count (FC), total fixation duration (TFD) and the proportion of left hemiface were analyzed by the Mixed design ANOVA, in which the main effect of "group", visual field (left vs. right) and gender of the faces was evaluated in addition to the interactions.@*Results@#All the participants in both the ASD group and TD group completed the experiments. For the whole face in LVF or RVF, the main effect of group showed the statistical significance on both FC and TFD [FC： F (1，206) =26.27, P <0.01; TFD： F (1，206) =51.23, P <0.01]. The interaction of group×visual field on FC also was statistically significant [ F (1，206) =4.619， P =0.03], and the case group showed the difference between LVF and RVF (0.33±0.02，0.54±0.03， P < 0.01 ) by further simple effect analysis, none of the rest was statistically significant. Both the left hemiface of FC & TFD showed the main effect of group [FC： F (1，206) =13.77， P ＜0.01；TFD： F (1，206) =12.89， P ＜0.01] and interaction of group×visual field [FC： F (1，206) = 36.99， P ＜0.01；TFD： F (1，206) =38.62， P ＜0.01), similarly, there was higher left hemiface proportion of both FC & TFD in RVF than that in LVF (FC：0.36±0.03，0.56±0.03， P <0.01; TFD：0.36±0.03，0.57±0.03， P <0.01).@*Conclusion@#LVF superiority is not presented among children with ASD in this study, while the fixation in RVF remained relatively unaffected. The finding indicates the involvement of the fusiform face area of right hemisphere in the pathogenesis of ASD in addition to the weak central coherence account.