Abstract
Several accounts have been proposed to explain difficulties with social interaction in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), amongst which atypical social orienting, decreased social motivation or difficulties with understanding the regularities driving social interaction. This study uses gaze-contingent eye-tracking to tease apart these accounts by measuring reward related behaviours in response to different social videos. Toddlers at high or low familial risk for ASD took part in this study at age 2 and were categorised at age 3 as low risk controls (LR), high-risk with no ASD diagnosis (HR-no ASD), or with a diagnosis of ASD (HR-ASD). When the on-demand social interaction was predictable, all groups, including the HR-ASD group, looked longer and smiled more towards a person greeting them compared to a mechanical Toy (Condition 1) and also smiled more towards a communicative over a non-communicative person (Condition 2). However, all groups, except the HR-ASD group, selectively oriented towards a person addressing the child in different ways over an invariant social interaction (Condition 3). These findings suggest that social interaction is intrinsically rewarding for individuals with ASD, but the extent to which it is sought may be modulated by the specific variability of naturalistic social interaction.
Highlights
Understanding the origin of the social interaction difficulties encountered by people with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), whether it results from atypical orienting towards social stimuli, from a decreased motivation to engage with them, or alternatively from difficulties understanding and interpreting social exchanges, possibly because of their variable and complex structure, has been a key question and a challenge in ASD research (Elsabbagh and Johnson, 2016)
Number of valid trials used for the analyses of Initial first looks, Looking time and Smiles, for each condition (1: Face vs. Toy; 2: Towards vs. Away; 3: Variable vs. Invariant) and each outcome group (LR, HR-no ASD, HR-ASD). *Number of valid trials out of 12 total trials for condition 1 and 2 and out of 26 total trials for condition 3
The analyses revealed a significant effect of Outcome (Waldχ2(2) = 6.07, p = 0.048) which was driven by a higher proportion of initial looks directed to the Towards stimulus for the HR-ASD group than for the low risk controls (LR) group (p=0.038)
Summary
Understanding the origin of the social interaction difficulties encountered by people with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), whether it results from atypical orienting towards social stimuli, from a decreased motivation to engage with them, or alternatively from difficulties understanding and interpreting social exchanges, possibly because of their variable and complex structure, has been a key question and a challenge in ASD research (Elsabbagh and Johnson, 2016). An alternative but not exclusive theory of ASD was proposed, suggesting that social interaction difficulties may occur because of the statistical structure of such interactions According to this account, when representing the world, individuals with ASD give too much weight to bottom-up inputs or to more recent events, to the detriment of priors computed on past events (i.e. hypo-priors, (Pellicano and Burr, 2012); low precision of prior information, (Friston et al, 2013)). Few studies have directly tested the impact that variability or predictability of an interaction has on social choices in ASD (Dawson et al., Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 29 (2018) 21–29
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