To covet what we see: Autistic traits modulate the relationship between looking and choosing

Abstract

Behavioral studies indicate that autistic traits predict reduced gaze toward social stimuli. Moreover, experiments that require participants to make an explicit choice between stimuli indicate reduced preferences for social stimuli in individuals with high autistic traits. These observations, in combination, fit with the idea that gaze is actively involved in the formation of choices—gaze toward a stimulus increases the likelihood of its subsequent selection. Although these aspects of gaze and choice behavior have been well characterized separately, it remains unclear how autistic traits affect the relationship between gaze and socially relevant choices. In a choice‐based eye‐tracking paradigm, we observed that autistic traits predict less frequent and delayed selection of social stimuli. Critically, eye tracking revealed novel phenomena underlying these choice behaviors: first, the relationship between gaze and choice behavior was weaker in individuals with high autistic traits—an increase in gaze to a stimulus was associated with a smaller increase in choice probability. Second, time‐series analyses revealed that gaze became predictive of choice behaviors at longer latencies in observers with high autistic traits. This dissociation between gaze and choice in individuals with high autistic traits may reflect wider atypicalities in value coding. Such atypicalities may predict the development of atypical social behaviors associated with the autism phenotype. Lay Summary When presented with multiple stimuli to choose from, we tend to look more toward the stimuli we later choose. Here, we found that this relationship between looking and choosing was reduced in individuals with high autistic traits. These data indicate that autistic traits may be associated with atypical processing of value, which may contribute to the reduced preferences for social stimuli exhibited by individuals with autism.

Autistic differences in the temporal dynamics of social attention

“…We speculate that ASDs are associated with abnormal coding of social reward value, which disrupts a ‘gaze cascade’ type effect that maintains the perceptual selection of social stimuli over time in NT observers. Indeed, there is recent evidence to suggest that autistic traits are associated with reduced gaze-cascade effects ( Hedger & Chakrabarti, 2021 ). This notion also fits well with data from a recent, novel paradigm that combined eye-tracking with a value-learning paradigm to investigate social attention in preschoolers ( Wang et al, 2018 ).…”

“…With these restrictions applied, the ASD sample was formed of 23 adults with a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text rev; DSM -IV TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2013 ) based diagnosis of ASD from a recognised clinic. Note that this sample of participants is the same as those reported in ( Hedger & Chakrabarti, 2021 ). All participants had normal/ corrected to normal vision.…”