Abstract
BackgroundJoint attention skills are impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recently, varying degrees of autistic social attention deficit have been detected in the general population. We investigated gaze-triggered attention in individuals with high and low levels of autistic traits under visual–auditory cross-modal conditions, which are more sensitive to social attention deficits than unimodal paradigms.MethodsSixty-six typically developing adults were divided into low- and high-autistic-trait groups according to scores on the autism-spectrum quotient (AQ) questionnaire. We examined gaze-triggered attention under visual–auditory cross-modal conditions. Two sounds (a social voice and a non-social tone) were manipulated as targets to infer the relationship between the cue and the target. Two types of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions (a shorter 200-ms SOA and a longer 800-ms SOA) were used to directly test the effect of gaze cues on the detection of a sound target across different temporal intervals.ResultsIndividuals with high autistic traits (high-AQ group) did not differ from those with low autistic traits (low-AQ group) with respect to gaze-triggered attention when voices or tones were used as targets under the shorter SOA condition. In contrast, under the longer SOA condition, gaze-triggered attention was not observed in response to tonal targets among individuals in the high-AQ group, whereas it was observed among individuals in the low-AQ group. The results demonstrated that cross-modal gaze-triggered attention is short-lived in individuals with high autistic traits.ConclusionsThis finding provides insight into the cross-modal joint attention function among individuals along the autism spectrum from low autistic traits to ASD and may further our understanding of social behaviours among individuals at different places along the autistic trait continuum.
Highlights
Joint attention skills are impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
In our previous study [13], we found that gaze-triggered attention was impaired under visual– auditory cross-modal conditions in adults with ASD
We found a significant main effect of validity (F (1, 64) = 30.19, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.32), with fewer incorrect responses under the valid compared with the invalid condition (1.3 vs. 2.5 %) and of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) (F (1, 64) = 33.32, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.34) and with more incorrect responses under the shorter compared with the longer SOA condition (2.4 vs. 1.4 %); we found a significant interaction of validity × SOA (F (1, 64) = 11.34, p = 0.001, ηp2 = 0.015), indicating fewer incorrect responses in valid compared with invalid ones under the shorter SOA (1.3 vs. 3.4 %) but not under the longer SOA (1.2 vs. 1.6 %) condition
Summary
Joint attention skills are impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The ability to coordinate attention to focus on the same location or event as another person, the phenomenon known as joint attention [1], has been thought to be a precursor of the development of the ability to attribute mental states (i.e. theory of mind). This phenomenon can be achieved when individual B perceives individual A’s direction of attention. In the context of joint attention, developing children typically use the eye gaze of others to make attributions about other people’s cognitive states, such as their intentions, and to speculate about what they want to do [1, 3]
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