Using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient and Social Network Size to Investigate Individual Variability in Social Attention in the Typical Population

Background: It is well documented that gaze direction causes shifts of attention. However, it remains unclear whether this attentional effect relates to social functioning in daily life. Data with clinical populations (i.e., individuals with autism spectrum disorder; ASD) suggest that a reduced interpretation of the social meaning of gaze in individuals with ASD might result from their susceptibility to irrelevant perceptual changes in the environment like pupil motion, which often accompany gaze shifts. Thus, typical individuals who are less socially competent might also be more susceptible to irrelevant changes in the perceptual environment, which in turn may reduce their ability to attend to a social gaze cue. Objectives: Here we investigated whether task irrelevant perceptual changes differentially affected attention to social gaze information as a function of individual level of social functioning. Methods: Thirty-nine undergraduate students completed: (i) a gaze cuing task, in which an irrelevant perceptual change entailed presenting gaze cues as either an onset or an offset; (b) the Autism-spectrum quotient questionnaire, which measures social competence in typical populations; and (c) the Social network questionnaire, which measures social network size. Results: Performance of socially competent participants did not vary with the tasks’ perceptual changes. However, in agreement with clinical data, less socially competent participants showed reduced magnitudes of social orienting when the task contained an irrelevant perceptual change, i.e., when cue onset and offset trials alternated. Furthermore, their scores on both questionnaires accounted for a significant amount of variability in their social orienting magnitudes under conditions of perceptual change. Conclusions: These data link social attention and social functioning and show that performance of typically developing individuals with lower social competence mirrors performance measured in clinical populations.