Autistic Traits and Sensitivity to Interference With Flavour Identification

The relationship between tendency to attend to detail, sensory sensitivity, and affective response to food cues - A registered report

Understanding the underlying drivers of food choice remains a challenge and has highlighted the need for measures that capture data over and above that offered by self-reporting tools. Consequently, a growing body of research has set out to interpret facial responses to food cues to offer a greater insight into the emotional responses that may drive food acceptance. However, interpreting facial responses is challenging, as there are numerous factors that may influence affective response to foods, including expectation, context, and individual differences. Existing findings suggest there is a link between autistic traits and sensory sensitivities; research highlights further links between sensory sensitivities and eating behaviour, and autistic traits and eating behaviour, with a body of research focusing on the autistic trait attention to detail (ATD). As such, the current study aimed to examine rapid facial activity in response to foods cues while capturing these individual differences present in the general population. This study found no evidence to suggest facial responses to food pictures were linked with attention to detail or hyper-sensitivity. The findings did support a general link between self-reported pleasantness ratings of viewed foods and activity of facial muscles. Post-hoc analyses suggested scoring on the social skills sub-scale of the Autism Quotient (AQ) was associated with levator activity while viewing pictures low in pleasantness. This study offers a greater understanding of variations, at the individual level, which are associated with affective response to foods, and may help to inform the development of tools that set out to predict food acceptance.

Young Adults with High Autistic-Like Traits Displayed Lower Food Variety and Diet Quality in Childhood

This study explored the association between autistic-like traits in young adults and dietary intake in early childhood in the Gen2 Raine Study cohort. Data were available from 811 participants at years 1, 2 and 3 for the assessment of dietary intake, and at year 20 for measurement of autistic-like traits. Results showed as autistic-like traits increased, total food variety, core food variety and dairy variety decreased (p < 0.05), with a lower consumption of citrus fruits and yoghurt (both p = 0.04). As autistic-like traits increased, diet quality decreased, this trend was significant at 2 years (p = 0.024). Our results suggest that young adults with higher autistic-like traits were more likely to have had lower food variety and diet quality in early childhood.

Autistic Traits and Enhanced Perceptual Representation of Pitch and Time

Enhanced basic perceptual discrimination has been reported for pitch in individuals with autism spectrum conditions. We test whether there is a correlational pattern of enhancement across the broader autism phenotype and whether this correlation occurs for the discrimination of pitch, time and loudness. Scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient correlated significantly with the pitch discrimination (r = -0.51, p < 0.05) and the time-interval discrimination (r = -0.45, p < 0.05) task that were based on a fixed reference. No correlation was found for intensity discrimination based on a fixed reference, nor for a variable reference based time-interval discrimination. The correlations suggest a relationship between autistic traits and the ability to form an enhanced, stable and highly accurate representation of auditory events in the pitch and time dimensions.

Lexical effects on children's speech processing: individual differences reflected in the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ)

PURPOSE

This study was undertaken to examine whether children exhibit the same relationship that adults show between lexical influence on phoneme identification and individual variation on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ).

METHOD

Data from 62 4- to 7-year-olds with no diagnosis of autism were analyzed. The main task involved identification of the initial sound in pairs of voice-onset time continua with a real word on one end and a nonword on the other (e.g., gift-kift, giss-kiss). Participants were also given the children's version of the AQ and a 2nd instrument related to autistic-like traits, the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS).

RESULTS

The lexical shift was related to the AQ (particularly to its Attention Switching subscale) but not to the SRS.

CONCLUSIONS

The size of lexical effects on children's speech perception can be predicted by AQ scores but not necessarily by other measures of autism-like traits. The results indicate that speech perception in children manifests individual differences along some general dimension of cognitive style reflected in the AQ, possibly in relation to local/global information processing.