Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cartoon scenes are frequently presented in picture books as a benefit for language development. However, it is unclear if autistic and typical developing children (ASD and TD, respectively) use different processing strategies accordingly. The study focused on how ASD and TD children examine the emotion-evoking areas in scenes for recognizing emotions. The research included 5 cartoon scenes as the study materials and recruited 91 ASD children and 121 TD children to participate in the study. The results revealed as following:1. ASD children showed lower accuracy in emotions recognition than TD children. 2. TD children showed greater gazing time on faces. 3. ASD children showed greater gazing time on emotion-evoking areas. Based on the findings, it is implied that ASD children and TD children use different gazing strategies which could have different impacts on the accuracy for emotion recognition in cartoon scenes.