Eye-movements reveal attention to social information in autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition in which children show reduced attention to social aspects of the environment. However in adults with ASD, evidence for social attentional deficits is equivocal. One problem is that many paradigms present social information in an unrealistic, isolated way. This study presented adults and adolescents, with and without ASD, with a complex social scene alongside another, non-social scene, and measured eye-movements during a 3-s viewing period. Analyses first identified viewing time to different regions and then investigated some more complex issues. These were: the location of the very first fixation in a trial (indicating attentional priority); the effect of a task instruction on scan paths; the extent to which gaze-following was evident; and the degree to which participants' scan paths were influenced by the low-level properties of a scene. Results indicate a superficially normal attentional preference for social information in adults with ASD. However, more sensitive measures show that ASD does entail social attention problems across the lifespan, supporting accounts of the disorder which emphasise lifelong neurodevelopmental atypicalities. These subtle abnormalities may be sufficient to produce serious difficulties in real-life scenarios.

Do Gaze Cues in Complex Scenes Capture and Direct the Attention of High Functioning Adolescents with ASD? Evidence from Eye-tracking

“…The difference in nature of the results between the current studies and those obtained by Riby and Hancock (2008) highlights the need to refrain from generalising results beyond the population involved in individual studies. The results of the current study are more similar to those recently obtained by Fletcher-Watson, Leekam, Benson, Frank and Findlay (2009) who ran an eye-tracking study with a similar cohort of participants to those in the current study. They also found that attention to people in scenes was not significantly reduced in high-functioning adolescents and adults with ASD but that the first fixation on a scene containing a person was significantly less likely to be located on that person in individuals with ASD than in typically developing individuals.…”

Brief Report: Patterns of Eye Movements in Face to Face Conversation are Associated with Autistic Traits: Evidence from a Student Sample

“…The nature of this finding is different to the reduced attention to faces often observed in children with autism (e.g. Klin et al 2002;Nakano et al, 2010;Riby & Hancock, 2008), but is in-line with recent findings that observed no overall reduction in eye-region viewing in older, high functioning individuals with autism when only one face or person was present in the each visual stimulus (Fletcher-Watson et al 2009;Freeth et al 2010). Findings from this new cohort of participants replicated previous findings, from Freeth et al (2013a) and Laidlaw et al (2011), using equipment enabling a much more finegrained temporal and spatial analysis of eye-movements compared to these previous studies and indicate that individuals with more autistic traits are focussing on socially relevant areas within their visual field as much as individuals who show fewer autistic traits, providing the opportunity to effectively spot and process any subtle social cues that may be produced by the social partner.…”

“…However, several studies have found no overall reduction in eye region viewing in ASD (e.g. McPartland et al, 2011;Freeth et al 2010;Fletcher-Watson et al 2009), suggesting that the association between ASD and social attention is complex. Some differences between studies may relate to differential social motivation elicited by different paradigms, e.g.…”

Endocannabinoid Signaling in Autism

“…Eyegaze tracking studies typically involve measuring gaze fixation patterns in response to social and nonsocial stimuli. Children and adults with ASD are found to look less at social stimuli than at nonsocial stimuli [83][84][85]. Gaze fixation patterns have often been used as proxy metrics related to reward processing [86], thus supporting the hypothesis of atypical processing of social rewards in ASD.…”