Children who overfocus on one small part of a picture, word or face may have difficulty with skills such as reading or recognizing people. UMass Medical School’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center has been studying visual attention in children and adolescents with intellectual or developmental disabilities to develop teaching methods to reduce the problem.
The Focus of Attention project, funded by grants from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, studies visual attention to improve teaching methods for children with intellectual or developmental disabilities. This behavior is characteristic of children with intellectual disabilities with or without autism, said William V. Dube, PhD, professor of psychiatry.
“In one of our early studies, we found that the problem with most children who could do matching tasks with individual items but not with two or more items, wasn’t that they couldn’t attend to more than one thing at a time, but that they weren’t moving their eyes effectively,” Dr. Dube said. “Once we got them moving their eyes, the accuracy went up. They had poorly organized observing behavior.”
The research involved two parts: assessment and intervention. For the assessment, children were recruited and given preliminary training to make sure they could do the tests. Some of the nonverbal children with autism could communicate with symbols on computer tablets.
One objective of the study was to determine whether overselectivity (the tendency to focus attention on one part of a person, the environment or the initial letter in a word and not process it as a whole) is more severe or prevalent in children with an autism spectrum disorder and an intellectual disability than in those who have a comparable intellectual disability but not autism. The study included three groups that had comparable developmental levels: children with autism spectrum disorder; children with Down syndrome (with the same IQ level as the children with autism); and a group of typically developing children.
The tests were developed so that accuracy was high if there was no overselectivity. As the tests became more complex, accuracy dropped in all three groups, but at the same rate. The results showed that overselectivity wasn’t more severe or prevalent in autism on these types of tests, Dube said.
The intervention examined the effectiveness of remedial training and the ways that remedial interventions could be incorporated into special education teaching. The researchers were trying to find the instructional support a child needs to avoid overselectivity.
“Children with severe intellectual disabilities are probably not going to learn by the methods used in typical educational settings,” Dube said.
