Challenging the Myth of Attentional Overfocus Among Persons with Autism Sprectrum Disorder

Background: Overfocused attention is often considered, at least implicitly and often explicitly, as central to essential theories of cognitive style of persons with ASD. The idea of an excessive focus on one piece, part of a piece, or group of pieces of information in the environment at the expense of processing others is consistent with various theories about the ways that persons with ASD process and respond to information. For example, the theory of mind deficit might be seen as an overfocus on objects and events from an egocentric view rather than on those from others’ viewpoints; the theory of executive function deficit as an overfocus on ideas in the here and now rather than on those for the future; and the theories of weak central coherence and enhanced perceptual functioning as an overfocus on details rather than on global objects.  These conceptual extrapolations from theory and behavior are consistent with historical depictions of attentional processing among persons with ASD as overfocused (Rincover & Ducharme, 1987; Wainwright-Sharp & Bryson, 1993) and overselective (Townsend & Courchesne, 1994; Townsend et al., 1996), but not as distractibile (Burack, 1994; Burack et al., 1997).

Objectives: To provide a more precise understanding of attentional functioning and modulation, specifically in relation to the notion of focus and its relevance to understanding cognitive styles among persons with ASD.

Methods: A critical analysis of the studies of attentional focus and filtering among persons with ASD based on the premise that two aspects of functioning should be especially heightened if attention were really overfocused – one, “zooming-in” the focus of attention to a meaningfully restricted spatial area, and two, maintaining that focus despite the occurrence of events or appearance of objects in the environment.

Results: Proponents for the overfocused approach cite evidence that individuals with ASD experience difficulty in broadening the focus of attention (Mann & Walker, 2003), deploy a narrower than typical attentional spotlight suggesting a prolonged zoom-in  lens but a sluggish zoom-out one (Ranconi et al., 2013), and display “tunnel vision” (Robertson et al., 2013). However, in a study with a dynamic version of the Erikson flanker task, children with ASD, as compared to MA-matched TD children, met neither of the essential criteria of over-focus but rather displayed behavior indicative of under-focus – they were distracted by targets quite distant from the target and by distractors that appeared considerably after the presentation of the target stimulus (Stewart et al., submitted). Although detrimental to performance on a flanker task, this type of underfocus might better be interpreted with regard to the hypothesis that increased distractor processing among persons with ASD results from enhanced perceptual capacity rather than an attentional deficit in filtering or focus (Remington et al., 2012).

Conclusions: A model that involves underfocus and increased perceptual capacity, rather than the common characterization of overfocus, might better represent the attentional and cognitive styles of persons with ASD. We offer new evidence to support this assertion and an alternative explanation for the findings typically cited to support the overfocus hypothesis.