In typical development there is a bias to orient visual attention to social information. Children with ASD do not reliably demonstrate this bias, and the role of attention orienting has not been well studied. We examined attention orienting via the inhibition of return (IOR) mechanism in a spatial cueing task using social-emotional cues; we studied 8- to 17-year-old children with ASD (n=41) and typically developing controls (TDC) (n=25). The ASD group exhibited a significantly stronger IOR effect than the TDC group, and the IOR effect correlated positively with social impairments, but was unrelated to co-occurring ADHD or anxiety symptoms. These results provide evidence of an early visual attention mechanism that is directly related to core social deficits in ASD
