Abstract
Our capacity to attend a target while ignoring irrelevant distraction impacts our ability to successfully interact with our environment. Previous reports have sometimes identified excessive distractor interference in both autism and schizophrenia spectrum disorders and in neurotypical individuals with high subclinical expressions of these conditions. Independent of task, we show that the direction of the effect of autism or psychosis traits on the suppression or rejection of a non-target item is diametrical. In Study 1, in which the presence of a salient non-target item hindered performance, higher autism traits were associated with better performance, while higher psychosis traits were associated with worse performance. In Study 2, in which the presence of a salient non-target item facilitated performance, a complete reversal of effects was observed. Future clinical interventions may be informed by the context-specific advantages we observed for the autism and psychosis spectra, and by the need to consider the diametric effects they yield.
Highlights
The perceptual saliency of distracting or competing non-target information presents a major challenge for attention selection processes, which are partially driven by the bottom-up salience of objects in the environment[1]
In this study, we showed that when participants were required to attend to a target in the presence of salient distractor or vice versa, increasing levels of autism traits were associated with reduced interference from the salient distractor, while psychosis traits were associated with increased interference
We examined differences between the two samples in terms of gender distribution, age, Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences Questionnaire (CAPEp), and Bias, which is the difference between the standardized scores of AQ and CAPEp
Summary
The perceptual saliency of distracting or competing non-target information presents a major challenge for attention selection processes, which are partially driven by the bottom-up salience of objects in the environment[1]. The present study has two main aims It examines whether autism and psychosis traits will be beneficial or detrimental depending on the task demand, and (2) whether autism versus psychosis traits would, regardless of the task (context), induce contrasting, diametric effects on target selection in the presence of a non-target, salient distractor. To this end, we conducted two separate studies in neurotypical individuals in whom autism and psychosis traits were assessed in tandem. Similar to our previous results[18], that, in contrast to psychosis traits, increasing autism traits will be beneficial to performance, i.e., withstanding greater level of distraction while still correctly identifying the face
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