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Just Another Social Scene: Evidence for Decreased Attention to Negative Social Scenes in High-Functioning Autism

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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.

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Notes

  1. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate valence and arousal values of the pictures drawn from commercially available sources. Forty-seven students (Mage = 19.8; SD = 7.3) rated a total of forty pictures for valence (from 1, very pleasant, to 9, very unpleasant), and arousal (from 1 very stimulating, to 9, very unstimulating) using the Self-Assessment Manikin (Bradley and Lang 1994). Each image was presented in random order for 10 s, and participants were asked to make the valence and arousal ratings independently and to try to use the whole scale. According to the rating results, four emotionally positive (valence M = 7.0; SD = 0.3; arousal M = 6.1; SD = 0.3), and fourteen neutral pictures (valence M = 4.96; SD = 0.4; arousal M = 4.6; SD = 0.8) were selected.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the participants and their families, as well as Chrystal Gaertner for her help with data collection.

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  1. David Da Fonseca

    Present address: Adolescent Psychiatry Unit, Salvator Hospital, AP-HM, Marseille, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mediterranean Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, CNRS-INCM, 31, Chemin Joseph Aiguier, 13402, Marseille cedex 20, France

    Andreia Santos, Thierry Chaminade, David Da Fonseca, Catarina Silva, Delphine Rosset & Christine Deruelle

  2. Autism Resources Center, Sainte Marguerite Hospital, Marseille, France

    David Da Fonseca & Delphine Rosset

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  1. Andreia Santos
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Correspondence to Andreia Santos.

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Santos, A., Chaminade, T., Da Fonseca, D. et al. Just Another Social Scene: Evidence for Decreased Attention to Negative Social Scenes in High-Functioning Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 42, 1790–1798 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-011-1415-6

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