title: Just another social scene: evidence for decreased attention to negative social scenes in high-functioning autism.
abstract: The adaptive threat-detection advantage takes the form of a preferential orienting of attention to threatening scenes. In this study, we compared attention to social scenes in 15 high-functioning individuals with autism (ASD) and matched typically developing (TD) individuals. Eye-tracking was recorded while participants were presented with pairs of scenes, either emotional positive-neutral, emotional negative-neutral or neutral-neutral scenes. Early allocation of attention, the first image fixated in each pair, differed between groups: contrary to TD individuals who showed the typical threat-detection advantage towards negative images, the ASD group failed to show a bias toward threat-related scenes. Later processing of stimuli, indicated by the total fixation to the images during the 3-s presentation, was found unaffected in the ASD group. These results support the hypothesis of an early atypical allocation of attention towards natural social scenes in ASD, that is compensated in later stages of visual processing.
authors.affiliation: Mediterranean Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, CNRS-INCM, 31, Chemin Joseph Aiguier, 13402, Marseille cedex 20, France. andreia.santos@incm.cnrs-mrs.fr
authors.forename: Andreia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Santos
authors.forename: Thierry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Chaminade
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Da Fonseca
authors.forename: Catarina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Silva
authors.forename: Delphine
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rosset
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Deruelle
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D020817:Asperger Syndrome / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D004644:Emotions; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception