The Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence (FTII; Fagan, 1987), the Early Social Communication Scale (ESCS; Seibert et al., 1982) and the Test of Orienting Preferences (TOP), an attention task designed for this study, were used to examine social versus nonsocial attention in children with autism and developmental disorders (n = 18). The Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS; Schopler, Reichler, & Renner, 1986) was used as a continuous diagnostic measure in order to correlate performance on the measures with the severity of autism. On the FTII, as autistic symptomatology increased, the percent of time a child oriented to novel stimuli in both immediate and delayed conditions also increased. On the ESCS, as autistic symptomatology increased, joint attention behaviors decreased. Comparing the ESCS and the FTII indicated that as joint attention behaviors decreased, selective attention to novelty increased. With respect to the new attention measure, children with typical development oriented more than 85% of the time to all stimuli, whereas children with more features of autism oriented less frequently to social and auditory stimuli, and were slower to orient to auditory stimuli. The findings represent preliminary behavioral evidence for a social attention deficit in children with autism. The implications for these findings are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.28061 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Klaiman, Cheryl M. |
| Contributors | Burack, Jake (advisor), Doehring, Peter (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001609539, proquestno: MQ43896, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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