Abstract
The pupil is known to reflect a range of psychological and physiological variables, including cognitive effort, arousal, attention, and even learning. Within autism spectrum disorder (ASD), some work has used pupil physiology to successfully classify patients with or without autism. As we have come to understand the heterogeneity of ASD and other neurodevelopmental disorders, the relationship between quantitative traits and physiological markers has become increasingly more important, as this may lead us closer to the underlying biological basis for atypical responses and behaviors. We implemented a novel paradigm designed to capture patterns of pupil adaptation during sustained periods of dark and light conditions in a pediatric sample that varied in intellectual ability and clinical features. We also investigate the relationship between pupil metrics derived from this novel task and quantitative behavioral traits associated with the autism phenotype. We show that pupil metrics of constriction and dilation are distinct from baseline metrics. Pupil dilation metrics correlate with individual differences measured by the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), a quantitative measure of autism traits. These results suggest that using a novel, yet simple, paradigm can result in meaningful pupil metrics that correlate with individual differences in autism traits, as measured by the SRS.
Highlights
Pupil response has a longstanding history of being used as a peripheral indicator of underlying neurologic and physiologic function
Two components of the pupil adaptation response were of interest in the current analysis: (1) the amplitude of dilation (AD) or constriction (AC) across each condition as well as (2) the latency to reach maximum dilation or constriction across each condition (See Fig. 2 for visual depiction of these metrics)
Each of these pupil metrics was compared across conditions in a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) in order to confirm the effect of our light and dark stimulus conditions on producing appropriate physiological responses
Summary
Pupil response has a longstanding history of being used as a peripheral indicator of underlying neurologic and physiologic function. Several studies have demonstrated a difference in baseline pupil diameter (i.e. pupil size in the absence of a task or stimulus) relative to age-matched controls[19, 20]. Discrepancies across reported results described above may be attributed to differences in task parameters and stimulus properties known to influence both baseline and task-induced pupil response, such as color and contrast[3,4,5]. Autism traits that are below the clinical threshold for diagnosis and commonly found in at least one parent of children with autism were first described as the broader autism phenotype (BAP) This term has been adopted to describe subclinical traits in the broader population that are continuously distributed[35,36,37]. This diverse yet continuous spectrum of neurobehavioral traits may be coupled with a diverse range of underlying neuronal features
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