Investigating Attention Across Development and the Autism Spectrum

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Selective attention is often studied as a stable, general-purpose mechanism, yet it varies substantially across individuals. What drives this variability, and how does it emerge over development? In this talk, Kim will present a research program that uses individual differences not as noise, but as a key source of insight into attention mechanisms across development and the autism spectrum. In the first part, she uses theory-driven paradigms to examine how selective attention develops in school-aged children, and how it interacts with perceptual processes and higher-order cognitive abilities. In the second part, she studies attention in large and diverse samples of autistic individuals by combining dynamic, naturalistic stimuli with scalable eye-tracking methods using smartphones and webcams. These approaches allow for capturing attention in more ecologically valid contexts and at unprecedented scale. Together, this work suggests that variability in attention reflects differences in interactions between attention, perceptual, and social-cognitive systems, and that understanding this variability is essential for explaining the heterogeneous behavioral profiles observed in neurodevelopmental conditions.

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