Abstract
One aspect of the social communication impairments that characterize autism spectrum disorder (ASD) include reduced use of often subtle non-verbal social cues. People with ASD, and those with self-reported sub-threshold autistic traits, also show impairments in rapid visual processing of stimuli unrelated to social or emotional properties. Hence, this study sought to investigate whether perceptually non-conscious visual processing is related to autistic traits. A neurotypical sample of thirty young adults completed the Subthreshold Autism Trait Questionnaire and a Posner-like attention cueing task. Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) was employed to render incongruous hierarchical arrow cues perceptually invisible prior to consciously presented targets. This was achieved via a 10 Hz masking stimulus presented to the dominant eye that suppressed information presented to the non-dominant eye. Non-conscious arrows consisted of local arrow elements pointing in one direction, and forming a global arrow shape pointing in the opposite direction. On each trial, the cue provided either a valid or invalid cue for the spatial location of the subsequent target, depending on which level (global or local) received privileged attention. A significant autism-trait group by global cue validity interaction indicated a difference in the extent of non-conscious local/global cueing between groups. Simple effect analyses revealed that whilst participants with lower autistic traits showed a global arrow cueing effect, those with higher autistic traits demonstrated a small local arrow cueing effect. These results suggest that non-conscious processing biases in local/global attention may be related to individual differences in autistic traits.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is defined by DSM-5 as representative of persistent deficits in social communication and interaction, including deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication, and repetitive patterns of behavior
Given that all arrow cues were incongruous, this latter example could be described as a local-invalid reaction time (RT) of 345 ms, and a local-valid RT of 335 ms, and local valid RT subtracted from local invalid RT produces a local cueing effect of 10 ms
It sought to determine whether anomalous biases in local/global processing previously found in consciously driven tasks on populations with higher autistic traits (e.g., Grinter et al, 2009; Crewther and Crewther, 2014), would persist without conscious awareness, perhaps reflective of a more generalized cognitive style
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is defined by DSM-5 as representative of persistent deficits in social communication and interaction, including deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication, and repetitive patterns of behavior. Skilled social interactions rely on the detection and interpretation of changes in non-verbal cues. Many of these social signals may be processed implicitly, without direct conscious awareness and are reported to be impaired in ASD (e.g., Senju et al, 2008; Schwartz et al, 2010; Schilbach et al, 2012). Electrophysiology and brain imaging studies have found that ASD groups show abnormal neural responses to implicit or non-conscious emotion processing when contrasting emotional and neutral faces (i.e., explicit attention is directed to non-emotional aspects of the stimuli, such as being required to make a gender discrimination) (e.g., Batty et al, 2011; Spencer et al, 2011; Nuske et al, 2014). Others have emphasized impairments in both explicit and implicit emotion processing (e.g., Critchley et al, 2000; Wong et al, 2008; Kuchinke et al, 2011)
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