Looking and learning: insights from atypical spontaneous gaze behaviour in autism
Paying attention is a critical first step towards learning. For children in primary school classrooms there can be many things to attend to other than the focus of a lesson, such as visual displays on classroom walls. Emerging evidence highlights how the physical classroom environment, loaded with task irrelevant visual information, can have a detrimental impact on learning for children developing typically. Task-irrelevant information may be particularly distracting for children functioning on the autism spectrum, as studies of social attention with this group have shown an attentional preference for non-social information. I will present the findings from a recent eye-tracking study in which we explored the impact of classroom visual displays on attention and learning for children with and without autism. The presence of visual displays had a significant impact on attention for all children, but to a greater extent for children with ASD. The impact on learning will be discussed as will the role of individual differences in cognition and behaviour.
Date: 7 February 2017, 15:00 (Tuesday, 4th week, Hilary 2017)
Venue: Tinbergen Building, South Parks Road OX1 3PS
Venue Details: C113 Weiskrantz Room
Speaker: Dr Mary Hanley (Durham University)
Organising department: Department of Experimental Psychology
Organiser: Alex Fraser (Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: alex.fraser@psy.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Department of Experimental Psychology - Language & Development Seminars
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Janice Young