Atypical scanning strategies of emotional faces for individuals with high autistic traits.

Abstract

Autism has become one of the primary diseases causing disability in children, and the incidence has risen rapidly in recent years. The preclinical study on individuals with high autistic traits is extremely important to reduce genetic risks of autism because high autistic traits is the susceptibility marker of autism. However, few studies explored the face scanning pattern of people with high autistic traits in typical developing populations. In this study, we designed a facial emotion recognition experiment including four emotions (happy, neutral, sad, angry) and three angles (0°, 45°, 90°) , and informed the participants to identify the facial emotion. Forty-two college students with typical development were recruited and divided into high autistic traits (HAT) group and low autistic traits (LAT) group by the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, and we collected the eye movement data using eye-tracking technology when they performed the task. The response time, recognition accuracy, AOI based proportional fixation time and pupil diameter were computed and analyzed for both groups. HATs showed significantly lower recognition accuracy and lower pupil diameter than LATs when recognizing negative emotions (P<0.05) , indicating HATs kept poor autonomic nervous arousal. What ' s more, the proportional fixation time of HATs were significantly more in mouth area but less in eye area than that of LAT group (P<0.05) , revealed HATs had an atypical emotional faces scanning strategies that paid less attention to eyes and more attention to mouth. Our research provides a feasible objective biomarker for screening high autistic traits population.