Measuring context: The gaze patterns of children with autism evaluated from the bottom-up

In this paper we use the mechanisms of a popular bottom-up computational model of visual attention in order to evaluate the gaze patterns of individuals in terms of elementary modalities such as color, orientation, motion, and intensity. We show that children with autism, even when watching naturalistic scenes, use less motion information, extending basic perceptual findings of motion deficits in autism to real-world scenes. In addition, by modifying the context of videos shown to children with and without autism (by changing the video scene, inverting the video, and displaying the video with and without sound) we show that that typical children, as compared to children with autism, are more affected by scene inversion. We discuss these and other results in terms of known sensory and cognitive abnormalities in autism and highlight the advantages and limitations of computational strategies in evaluating the effects of context on perceptual utilization.