Abstract
This study was designed to ascertain the relationship between visual attention for social information and oxytocin (OT) levels in Japanese preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We hypothesized that poor visual attention for social information and low OT levels are crucially important risk factors associated with ASD. We measured the pattern of gaze fixation for social information using an eye-tracking system, and salivary OT levels by the Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA). There was a positive association between salivary OT levels and fixation duration for an indicated object area in a finger-pointing movie in typically developing (TD) children. However, no association was found between these variables in children with ASD. Moreover, age decreased an individual's attention to people moving and pointed-at objects, but increased attention for mouth-in-the-face recognition, geometric patterns, and biological motions. Thus, OT levels likely vary during visual attention for social information between TD children and those with ASD. Further, aging in preschool children has considerable effect on visual attention for social information.
Highlights
Oxytocin (OT), a neuropeptide secreted from the posterior pituitary, has physiological functions in labor and lactation, and there is increasing evidence that OT plays an important role in modulating social behavior in diverse species (Donaldson and Young, 2008; Insel, 2010)
A significant difference was observed in the fixation % on stimuli of upright positions [t(56) = 3.10, p < 0.01], indicating that female typically developing (TD) children were more attentive to biological motion than were male children, no sex-related difference in attention for inverted presentation of bodily motion was found between groups [t(56) = 0.38, n.s.]
This study examined the relationship between gaze fixation for social information and OT levels in preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or typical development
Summary
Oxytocin (OT), a neuropeptide secreted from the posterior pituitary, has physiological functions in labor and lactation, and there is increasing evidence that OT plays an important role in modulating social behavior in diverse species (Donaldson and Young, 2008; Insel, 2010). OT affects the activation of brain areas responsible for emotion, mentalization, and cognitive control, including the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (Kirsch et al, 2005; Domes et al, 2007a; Baumgartner et al, 2008). Oxytocin receptors (OXTR) are expressed in brain areas, such as medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), amygdala and dorsal striatum (Landgraf and Neumann, 2004; Skuse and Gallagher, 2009), that are involved in social behavior, including reproductive and maternal behaviors, affiliation and attachment, and reactivity to social stress in nonhuman mammals (Carter, 1998; Ferguson et al, 2000; Young and Wang, 2004). OXTR gene polymorphisms were associated with prosocial behavior in a dictator game and in social value orientations tasks (Israel et al, 2009)
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