Hyper‐focus, sticky attention, and springy attention in young autistic children: Associations with sensory behaviors and cognitive ability
We tracked young autistic children's eye gaze in order to gain insights about how they attend to and experience things around them. Autistic children who were slower to “unstick” their attention from...
We found no evidence that autistic children exhibited greater “sticky attention” than nonautistics, but “sticky attention” in autism was associated with more caregiver-reported sensory hyper-responsiveness, seeking/interests, and enhanced perception.
Autistic children also nonsignificantly trended toward exhibiting reduced novelty preference. Unexpectedly, the time-course of this trending novelty preference difference implied it was not driven by reduced orienting to novelty, but increased returning to already-familiarized stimuli: what we call “springy attention.” Exploratory analyses of data from the attentional disengagement task suggest autistic participants may have exhibited greater “springy attention,” though further research with paradigms optimized for measuring this construct should confirm this. Importantly, “springy attention” was robustly related to reduced cognitive abilities and greater caregiver-reported hypo-responsiveness. Thus, this study illuminates two distinct domain-general attentional patterns, each with distinct correlates in young autistic children, which could have important implications for understanding autistic children's learning, development, and experiences.
One outstanding question is what might happen after study participants look away from the previous focus of their attention in a gap-overlap task or a novelty preference task and begin to focus on a newly-presented stimulus. Do participants often return to their previous focus of attention? Even in enjoyable leisure activities, such as playing video games, humans can exhibit momentary mind-wandering (Varao-Sousa, 2019), suggesting that momentary inattention need not prevent people from quickly returning to a focused state. Thus, we explore whether autistic and nonautistic children orient to a newly-presented stimulus then disengage from it to return to what they were looking at before, a pattern that we call “springy attention.”
we quantified “springy attention” as visual preference to the familiarized stimulus 500–2000 ms after first fixation on the novel stimulus (Figure 5).
Interestingly, among autistic participants, correlations between sensory/cognitive variables and “springy attention,” defined as visual preference to the central target in the overlap condition 500–1000 ms after first fixation on the peripheral target (Figure 7), showed nearly the opposite pattern of statistical significance as correlations with “sticky attention”
Autistic participants displaying more “springy attention” reportedly exhibited more sensory hypo-responsiveness, Spearman's ρ = 0.50, corrected p = 0.02 (Figure 7b), and were assessed as displaying lower cognitive abilities, Spearman's ρ = −0.68, corrected p < 0.0001 (Figure 7e). There were no significant associations with hyper-responsiveness, sensory interests/seeking, or EP, all p ≥ 0.64 (Table 2).
The present study describes two forms of atypical attention in young autistic children: “sticky attention,” the well-studied tendency to disengage attention slowly from stimuli, and what we describe as “springy attention,” the tendency to return to a previous focus of attention after briefly orienting to a newly-presented stimulus. These attentional patterns could be regarded as distinct forms of hyper-focus in autism, which might help begin to clarify some of the conceptual confusion surrounding hyper-focus, monotropism, and how they specifically manifest and relate to one another.
In contrast to some prior studies (Sacrey et al., 2014), we did not observe heightened “sticky attention” in the autistic group. However, among autistic participants, we observed robust associations between “sticky attention” and heightened caregiver-reported sensory hyper-responsiveness, sensory interests/seeking, and EP. Meanwhile, we observed a nonsignificant trend toward diminished novelty preference in autism, and though the Bayesian analysis did not suggest it provided evidence to suggest this effect was robust, this prompted us to examine whether it might reflect a “springy attention” pattern rather than failure to orient to novelty. When we then returned to the gap-overlap task, exploring whether similar “springy attention” was evident there, group differences in “springy attention” achieved statistical significance in frequentist analyses, as did associations between autistic participants' “springy attention” and lower cognitive abilities as well as greater sensory hypo-responsiveness.
This study describes distinct forms of atypical attention, and presumably hyper-focus, in young autistic children: “sticky attention,” which has been widely studied, and “springy attention,” a tendency to return to previous focuses of attention after briefly looking away. We did not observe group differences in “sticky attention,” which might reflect the slow timing of stimuli in this study, but we found heightened “springy attention” in autistic people in a gap-overlap task, and more “springy attention” at a trend level in a novelty preference task. “Sticky attention” in autistic participants was robustly associated with caregiver reports of sensory hyper-responsiveness, EP, and sensory interests/seeking, suggesting slow disengagement of attention from stimuli might result in more intense perceptual experiences, with either negative or positive valences depending on stimulus aversiveness. Meanwhile, “springy attention” in young autistic children appeared to be associated with sensory hypo-responsiveness, suggesting that a persistent attentional focus on certain stimuli might lead to other sensory stimuli being ignored. Crucially, we observed a robust association between “springy attention” and lower cognitive abilities in autistic children, suggesting that this persistent focus might prevent opportunities for learning and have cascading effects on development.
