We all have things that we’re interested in: Hobbies, favorite tv shows, topic areas we can’t learn enough about. Most of the time, we are able to inhibit our desires related to our interests - talking about them, thinking about them - when it is socially appropriate. Some children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are less able to modulate their thought patterns to match what is appropriate for the situation. The intense focus on one’s interests is sometimes called special interests or restricted interests and can lead to a reduced ability to form social relationships or carry out social interactions.

To investigate the the role of restricted interests in executive functioning and ASD psychopathology, we created tasks that utilized the restricted interests of each participant as stimuli, such as specific TV shows and video games. Some of these stimuli were in the form of photos administered in an iPad task, while others were in the form of videos administered during fMRI. Using a novel visual search task, we found no differences in low-level visual search between participants with ASD and neurotypical participants, despite known differences in visual processing between the groups in other domains. This finding suggests that inhibitory behavior differences in ASD likely originate farther down the processing stream.

A poster I presented at FLUX in 2019 on a deeply sampled fMRI dataset of 6 participants watching videos of their interests.

Silver, B.M., Conte, M.M., Victor, J.D., Jones, R.M. (2020). Visual search for circumscribed interests in autism is similar to that of neurotypical individuals. Frontiers in Psychology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.582074

Silver, B.M., Lynch, C.J., Clark-Whitney, E., Barnes, E., Power, J.D., Jones, R.M. Longitudinal resting-state fMRI using individual-specific analyses in autism. Poster presented at the FLUX Congress; New York, NY. 2019.

Silver, B.M., Barnes, E., Clark-Whitney, E., Conte, M.M., Victor, J.D., Jones, R.M. Developing a novel visual search task personalized for individual interests. Poster presented at the INSAR Conference; Montreal, Canada. 2019.

Bos, D.J., Silver, B.M., Barnes, E., Ajodan, E.L., Silverman, M.R., Clark- Whitney, E., Tarpey, T., Jones, R.M. (2019). Adolescent-specific motivation deficits in autism versus typical development. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-04258-9

Bos, D.J., Silverman, M.R., Ajodan, E.L., Martin, C., Silver, B.M., Brouwer, G., Di Martino, A., Jones, R.M. (2019). Rigidity coincides with reduced cognitive control to affective cues in children with autism. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/faz45

Silver, B.M., Bos, D.J., Ajodan, E., Silverman, M., Power, J.D., Jones, R.M. Preferred interests interfere with self-control in autism; Poster presented at The Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Conference; Brooklyn, NY. 2018.