The Effect of Autistic Traits on Social Orienting in Typically Developing Individuals

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by wide ranging and heterogeneous changes in social and cognitive abilities, including deficits in orienting attention during early processing of stimuli. Investigators have found that there is a continuum of autism-like traits in the general population, suggesting that these autistic traits may be examined in the absence of clinically diagnosed autism. To provide evidence for the continuum of autistic traits in terms of social attention and to provide insights into social attention deficits in people with autism, the current study was conducted to examine the effect of autistic traits of typically developing individuals on social orienting using a spatial cueing paradigm. The typically developing individuals who participated in this study were divided into high autistic traits (HA) and low autistic traits groups using the Autism Quotient scale. All participants completed a spatial cueing task in which social cues (gaze) and non-social cues (arrow) were presented under different cue predictability conditions (predictive vs. non-predictive) with different SOAs (100 ms vs. 400 ms). The results showed that compared to low autistic individuals, high autistic individuals had less benefit from nonpredictive social cues but greater benefit from non-social ones, providing evidence that such spatial attention impairment in high autistic individuals is specific to the social domain. Interestingly, the smaller benefit from non-predictive social cues in high autistic individuals was shown only in the 400 ms condition, not in the 100 ms condition, suggesting that their difficulties in orienting to non-predictive social cues may be caused by a deficiency in spontaneously effortful control processing.

Performance in a gaze-cueing task is associated with autistic traits

“…This contrasts with a previous study that reported a negative correlation between AQ scores and gaze-cueing effect, but no correlations between AQ scores and arrow-cueing effect [19] , suggesting a reduced salience of social gaze in individuals with high autistic traits. The present results also contrast with another recent study that reported that, in a gaze-cueing paradigm, the cueing effect was larger for individuals with low AQ than for individuals with high AQ [21] . The discrepancies between the present and previous results might be ascribed to the small number of subjects in the current study.…”

“…Higher scores in the AQ test were also associated with impaired interpretation of nonverbal aspects of social communication, such as hand gestures and facial expressions [15] , impaired facial recognition [16] and impaired social learning [17] , [18] . In addition, a few studies also reported differences in gaze-triggered orienting in TD subjects with low and high levels of autistic traits [18] – [21] . However, it is still not fully understood how gaze orienting in individuals with different levels of autistic traits is differentially modulated by facial expressions and direct eye contact.…”

Internal reliability, homogeneity, and factor structure of the ten-item Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ-10) with two additional response categories

“…The autism-spectrum quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al, 2001) is a questionnaire used as a screening tool for autism in psychiatric and psychological diagnostics (Huang et al, 2020;Woodbury-Smith et al, 2005). It is also applied in research to measure autistic traits in the general population (e.g., Lewton et al, 2019;Lin et al, 2020;Yaxu et al, 2020). In particular, its ten-item short form (AQ-10; Allison et al, 2012) can be an efficient measure for research purposes (e.g., Bertrams & Schlegel, 2020;Gollwitzer et al, 2019;Lundin et al, 2019).…”

Interpersonal matching of autistic trait levels in typically developed individuals is associated with spontaneous gaze following and initiation during face‐to‐face social interaction

“…Previous studies have shown that TD individuals who are high in autistic traits perform similarly to individuals with ASD on various tasks. For example, TD individuals who are high in autistic traits exhibit worse performance in gaze‐triggered orienting tasks than individuals who are low in autistic traits (Hudson et al, 2012; Lassalle & Itier, 2015; Lin et al, 2020).…”