Impaired cognitive flexibility in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been reported in previous literature. The present study explored ASD children’s visual scanning patterns during the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task using eye-tracking technique. ASD and typical developing (TD) children completed the standardized DCCS procedure on the computer while their eye movements were tracked. Behavioral results confirmed previous findings on ASD children’s deficits in executive function. ASD children’s visual scanning patterns also showed some specific underlying processes in the DCCS task compared to TD children. For example, ASD children looked shorter at the correct card in the postswitch phase and spent longer time at blank areas than TD children did. ASD children did not show a bias to the color dimension as TD children did. The correlations between the behavioral performance and eye moments were also discussed. 1. Introduction Executive dysfunction has been well studied and consistently found in previous studies in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) [1–3]. Executive function (EF) refers to a wide range of abilities including planning, inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, impulse control, and so forth [1, 2, 4, 5]. The EF deficit in ASD has been found to be related to their symptoms of restricted and repetitive behaviors [6, 7], and their impairments in Theory of Mind [8–12]. Impaired EF has been found in ASD children in numerous previous studies, including the impaired planning skills in the Tower of Hanoi or the Tower of London task [13–17], the impaired visual spatial working memory [18–28] and verbal working memory [23, 29], the impaired inhibitory control in the Stroop task [20, 30, 31], and the deficit in cognitive flexibility in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST) [13, 32]. However, contradictory findings came from studies that did not find EF deficits in ASD, for example, in the working memory task [30] and in the WCST [31]. The Dimensional Change Card Sorting task, developed by Frye et al. [33], was widely used to measure the cognitive flexibility of typically developing (TD) preschoolers. Compared with the WCST, the DCCS task is relatively simple and suitable to use across a wide age range [34]. The DCCS task asks children to sort bidimensional test cards (e.g., a red rabbit and a blue boat) with one of the two target cards (e.g., a red boat and a blue rabbit) according to one rule (e.g., by color), and then after several successful trials, switch to another rule (e.g., by shape). Previous
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