Autistic Traits Do Not Affect Emotional Face Processing in a General Population Sample

Evidence of a reduced role for circumscribed interests in the social attention patterns of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Reduced social attention is characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It has been suggested to result from an early onset and excessive influence of circumscribed interests (CIs) on gaze behaviour, compared to typically developing (TYP) individuals. To date, these findings have been mixed. The current eye-tracking study utilised a visual preference paradigm to investigate the influence of CI versus non-CI objects on attention patterns in children with ASD (aged 3-12 years, n = 37) and their age-matched TYP peers (n = 30). Compared to TYP, social and object attention was reduced in the ASD group irrespective of the presence of CIs. Results suggest a reduced role for CIs and extend recent evidence of atypical attention patterns across social and non-social domains in ASD.

Temporal course of attention bias toward emotional faces in individuals with autistic traits: an eye-movement study

Introduction

Similar attention patterns have been found in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and autistic traits (ATs). The Intense World Theory and previous studies suggest that individuals with ASD may demonstrate a vigilance-avoidance attention pattern toward emotional faces. However, the attention patterns in individuals with ATs remain unclear. Therefore, this study employs eye-tracking technology to examine the characteristics and temporal course of attention bias toward emotional faces in individuals with ATs.

Methods

The Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ) was used to evaluate the level of ATs among 2,502 college students. A total of 50 participants were selected from the 2,502 college students: 25 high-AQ group participants were randomly selected from the 10% of individuals with the highest AQ scores. Similarly, 25 low-AQ group participants were randomly selected from the 10% of participants with the lowest AQ scores. All selected participants completed an eye-tracking study while performing a dot-probe task with emotional faces (positive-neutral, negative-neutral, and negative-positive). By analyzing data from different time periods, the attention bias and time course of individuals with ATs toward emotional faces were investigated.

Results

The results show that compared to the low-AQ group, the high-AQ group detected negative faces faster in the early stages of emotional face processing. As the presentation time of emotional faces increased (at the 2-3 s mark), the fixation scores for negative-neutral faces of the high-AQ group were less than 0.5, which was significantly lower than those of the low-AQ group. Meanwhile, the high-AQ group showed brief attentional avoidance toward positive emotion at 3-4 s in the positive-neutral trials, indicating that the high-AQ group exhibited attention avoidance to both negative and positive faces during the middle and later stages of emotional processing.

Conclusion

This study suggests that individuals with ATs display a vigilance-avoidance pattern toward emotional faces. It contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of attention in persons with ATs and further supports the Intense World Theory.

Atypical scanning strategies of emotional faces for individuals with high autistic traits

Autism has become one of the primary diseases causing disability in children, and the incidence has risen rapidly in recent years. The preclinical study on individuals with high autistic traits is extremely important to reduce genetic risks of autism because high autistic traits is the susceptibility marker of autism. However, few studies explored the face scanning pattern of people with high autistic traits in typical developing populations. In this study, we designed a facial emotion recognition experiment including four emotions (happy, neutral, sad, angry) and three angles (0°, 45°, 90°) , and informed the participants to identify the facial emotion. Forty-two college students with typical development were recruited and divided into high autistic traits (HAT) group and low autistic traits (LAT) group by the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, and we collected the eye movement data using eye-tracking technology when they performed the task. The response time, recognition accuracy, AOI based proportional fixation time and pupil diameter were computed and analyzed for both groups. HATs showed significantly lower recognition accuracy and lower pupil diameter than LATs when recognizing negative emotions (P<0.05) , indicating HATs kept poor autonomic nervous arousal. What ' s more, the proportional fixation time of HATs were significantly more in mouth area but less in eye area than that of LAT group (P<0.05) , revealed HATs had an atypical emotional faces scanning strategies that paid less attention to eyes and more attention to mouth. Our research provides a feasible objective biomarker for screening high autistic traits population.