Are Social Cognitive Deficits Relative in Autism? Examination Using a Social Versus Nonsocial Salience Paradigm

Background: When left to their own, how do children with autism “spend” their attention and time, and what might this suggest to us in our search for models of pathogenesis and treatment of autism? As parents of children with autism know, these children spend a disproportionate amount of time seeking out and engaging in idiosyncratic and primarily nonsocial patterns of behavior and interest.

Objectives: When viewed from the perspective of experience-dependent brain and behavioral development, such a narrow, nonsocial pattern of behavior and interests likely diminishes social experience, and, in turn opportunities for social learning and development. Does this pattern of autistic development unfold as a result of a predisposition to avoid social stimulation, or a predisposition to approach nonsocial stimulation?In this study we examine if the presence of nonsocial stimuli can alter social information processing in children with ASD.

Methods: Preferential viewing tasks can serve as objective measures of salience, with a greater proportion of viewing time to one item indicative of increased salience. The current task used gaze-tracking technology to examine patterns of visual attention to stimulus pairs that varied in social and nonsocial content. Pairs included a social image (face) and a picture of one of two types of objects: objects found in previous studies to be of high interest to individuals with ASD (HAI images; e.g. trains, electronics) and objects found to be of low interest to individuals with ASD (LAI images; e.g. clothing, furniture). Participants included both adolescents diagnosed with ASD (N = 33, mean age = 13.9 years) and typically developing (TYP; N = 32, mean age = 14.1 years); groups were matched on IQ and gender.

Results: Repeated measures ANOVA revealed an increased latency to social images in individuals with ASD only when the social image was paired with an HAI nonsocial image [F(1,63) = 4.3, p = .042]. Individuals with ASD spent a greater proportion of time looking to objects, regardless of array type [F(1,63) = 15.4, p = .005], while TYP individuals spent a greater proportion of time looking to social images [F(1,63) = 20.1, p = .001]. Fixation patterns differed between groups only for social images, with TYP individuals displaying significantly longer fixations to social images than ASD, regardless of array type [F(1,63) = 25.7, p = .0001]; object fixation duration did not differ between groups [F(1,63) = .22, p = .794] or between array types [F(1,63) = 1.0, p = .31].

Conclusions: These results suggest that in ASD, deficits in social information processing may be relative and context-dependent, as opposed to being a fixed core feature of the disorder. In this model, social inattention may occur as a secondary byproduct of a positive attention bias to nonsocial information. In ASD, the presence of nonsocial sources of stimulation can significantly increase the latency of look time to social sources of information. In an ecologically valid context, this could translate to either delays in social information processing or to missing critical social information entirely.