Autistic traits influence gaze-oriented attention to happy but not fearful faces

Abstract

The relationship between autistic traits and gaze-oriented attention to fearful and happy faces was investigated at the behavioral and neuronal levels. Upright and inverted dynamic face stimuli were used in a gaze-cueing paradigm while event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Participants responded faster to gazed-at than to non-gazed-at targets, and this gaze orienting effect (GOE) diminished with inversion, suggesting it relies on facial configuration. It was also larger for fearful than happy faces but only in participants with high autism-spectrum quotient (AQ) scores. While the GOE to fearful faces was of similar magnitude regardless of AQ scores, a diminished GOE to happy faces was found in participants with high AQ scores.

At the ERP level, a congruency effect on target-elicited P1 component reflected enhanced visual processing of gazed-at targets. In addition, cue-triggered early directing attention negativity and anterior directing attention negativity reflected, respectively, attention orienting and attention holding at gazed-at locations. These neural markers of spatial attention orienting were not modulated by emotion and were not found in participants with high AQ scores. Together, these findings suggest that autistic traits influence attention orienting to gaze and its modulation by social emotions such as happiness.

Keywords:

• Autism-spectrum quotient
• ERPs
• Emotions
• Gaze
• Attention

This work was supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation [#213322], the Canada Research Chair Program [#959-213322], and an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario government [#ER11-08-172] to RJI.

Notes

¹ Development of the MacBrain Face Stimulus Set was overseen by Nim Tottenham and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development. Please contact Nim Tottenham at [email protected] for more information concerning the stimulus set.

² The faces were the exact same as the ones presented in the ERP experiment; see Section “Reaction times” for a full description of the face stimuli used.

³ According to Van Dam, Gros, Earleywine, and Antony (2013), a cutoff of 43 should be used in research settings to indicate probable cases of clinical anxiety (sensitivity = .73, specificity = .74, classification accuracy = .74).

⁴ Note that anxiety could not be used as a covariate in the ANOVA as it would violate the assumption of linear relationship between the covariate and the dependent variable given that anxiety and the GOEs do not correlate (Owen & Froman, 1998).

⁵ Note, however, that anxiety cannot be used as a covariate in this analysis, as the groups were nonrandomly selected (see Miller & Chapman, 2001 for a detailed explanation).