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Exogenous attention to social stimuli in the neurotypical population: The impact of autism traits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

F. Barros ,
N. Teixeira ,
C. Figueiredo ,
S. Silva  and
S. Soares
F. Barros*
Affiliation:
William James Center For Research (wjcr), Department Of Education And Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal Center For Health Technology And Services Research (cintesis), Department Of Education And Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
N. Teixeira
Affiliation:
William James Center For Research (wjcr), Department Of Education And Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
C. Figueiredo
Affiliation:
Research Unit On Governance, Competitiveness And Public Policies (govcopp), University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
S. Silva
Affiliation:
Institute Of Electronics And Informatics Engineering Of Aveiro (ieeta), University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal Department Of Electronics, Telecommunications, And Informatics (deti), University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
S. Soares
Affiliation:
William James Center For Research (wjcr), Department Of Education And Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal Center For Health Technology And Services Research (cintesis), Department Of Education And Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
*
*Corresponding author.

Abstract

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Introduction

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been associated with decreased spontaneous attention to social stimuli. Several studies further suggest that a higher expression of autism traits (AT) in the neurotypical population (NTP) may also be related to decreased social attention, although the evidence is still scarce, especially when considering faces as task-irrelevant distractors.

Objectives

This study aimed to explore the relationship between the expression of AT in the NTP and exogenous attention to social stimuli.

Methods

Fifty-one adult participants were recruited and asked to complete the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), to measure AT, and to perform an attentional capture task. In the latter, they were instructed to detect a target letter in the middle of perceptually similar (high perceptual load) or dissimilar (low perceptual load) distractor letters. In 25% of the trials, task-irrelevant distractors, consisting of images of faces (social) or houses (non-social), were shown flanking the letter stimuli.

Results

Response times were found to be affected by distractor-response compatibility, increasing for contralateral distractors, but decreasing for ipsilateral distractors, in relation to trials with no distractors (baseline). Importantly, these trends were magnified for distractor faces in the group with less AT, considering the social skills dimension of AQ, while the same tendency was observed in the group with higher AT, but for distractor houses.

Conclusions

Our results support an altered attentional performance in the subclinical phenotype of the autism spectrum. Furthermore, they also add to existing literature documenting similar attentional abnormalities in both the clinical and subclinical extremes of the spectrum, hinting possible shared mechanisms.

Disclosure

No significant relationships.

Keywords

autismAttentionsocial cognitionBroader Autism Phenotype
Type
Abstract
Information
European Psychiatry , Volume 64 , Special Issue S1: Abstracts of the 29th European Congress of Psychiatry , April 2021 , pp. S613 - S614
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Psychiatric Association
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