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Caruana N, Brock J. No association between autistic traits and contextual influences on eye-movements during reading. PeerJ. 2014;2:e466doi: 10.7717/peerj.466.
Caruana, N., & Brock, J. (2014). No association between autistic traits and contextual influences on eye-movements during reading. PeerJ, 2e466. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.466
Caruana, Nathan, and Brock, Jon. "No association between autistic traits and contextual influences on eye-movements during reading." PeerJ vol. 2 (2014): e466. doi: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.466
Caruana N, Brock J. No association between autistic traits and contextual influences on eye-movements during reading. PeerJ. 2014 Jun 26;2:e466. doi: 10.7717/peerj.466. eCollection 2014. PMID: 25024927; PMCID: PMC4081132.
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PeerJ. 2014 Jun 26;2:e466. doi: 10.7717/peerj.466. eCollection 2014.

No association between autistic traits and contextual influences on eye-movements during reading.

PeerJ

Nathan Caruana, Jon Brock

Affiliations

  1. ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders , Australia www.ccd.edu.au ; Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.
  2. ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders , Australia www.ccd.edu.au ; Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia ; Department of Psychology, Macquarie University , Sydney , Australia.

PMID: 25024927 PMCID: PMC4081132 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.466

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.

Keywords: Autism; Autistic traits; Central coherence; Eye-movements; Reading; Reading comprehension; Semantic processing; Sentence context

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