Abstract
Extensive study of typically developing individuals and those on the autism spectrum has identified a large number of brain regions associated with our ability to navigate the social world. Although it is widely appreciated that this so-called “social brain” is composed of distinct, interacting systems, these component parts have yet to be clearly elucidated. Here we used measures of eye movement and neural typicality—based on the degree to which subjects deviated from the norm—while typically developing (N = 62) and individuals with autism (N = 36) watched a large battery of movies depicting social interactions. Our findings provide clear evidence for distinct, but overlapping, neural systems underpinning two major components of the “social brain,” social orienting, and inferring the mental state of others.
Highlights
Extensive study of typically developing individuals and those on the autism spectrum has identified a large number of brain regions associated with our ability to navigate the social world
All participants completed a behavioral session outside the scanner, in which they watched 24 short (14 s) movie clips taken from popular Hollywood movies, while their eye movements were being recorded
To directly test whether the same network, which we found in typically developing (TD) participants, underlies social orienting in participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we examined the correlation between eye movement typicality and neural typicality within the network defined by the TD group for the ASD group
Summary
Extensive study of typically developing individuals and those on the autism spectrum has identified a large number of brain regions associated with our ability to navigate the social world. The presence of faces in the scene is a better predictor of fixations than saliency maps[4,5] and orientation to faces is further enhanced in the presence of accompanying speech[6] Other social cues, such as gaze direction, emotion, and touch are better at predicting attentional focus than low-level visual features[7] and information derived from head orientation and body position on top of gaze direction have been shown to strongly modulate social attention[8,9]. For adolescents and young adults on the high functioning end of the spectrum these manifest most consistently as deficits in complex mentalizing or theory of mind tasks, these deficits can be subtle and difficult to probe experimentally[23,24,25,26] High functioning adolescents and young adults with ASD exhibit aberrant social orienting as manifested by aberrant eye movements to faces and other social stimuli, again, differences can be subtle and are usually only apparent when examined with complex stimuli or sensitive metrics[27,28,29]
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