Dataset Information

Comparing social attention in autism and amygdala lesions: effects of stimulus and task condition.

ABSTRACT: The amygdala plays a critical role in orienting gaze and attention to socially salient stimuli. Previous work has demonstrated that SM a patient with rare bilateral amygdala lesions, fails to fixate and make use of information from the eyes in faces. Amygdala dysfunction has also been implicated as a contributing factor in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), consistent with some reports of reduced eye fixations in ASD. Yet, detailed comparisons between ASD and patients with amygdala lesions have not been undertaken. Here we carried out such a comparison, using eye tracking to complex social scenes that contained faces. We presented participants with three task conditions. In the Neutral task, participants had to determine what kind of room the scene took place in. In the Describe task, participants described the scene. In the Social Attention task, participants inferred where people in the scene were directing their attention. SM spent less time looking at the eyes and much more time looking at the mouths than control subjects, consistent with earlier findings. There was also a trend for the ASD group to spend less time on the eyes, although this depended on the particular image and task. Whereas controls and SM looked more at the eyes when the task required social attention, the ASD group did not. This pattern of impairments suggests that SM looks less at the eyes because of a failure in stimulus-driven attention to social features, whereas individuals with ASD look less at the eyes because they are generally insensitive to socially relevant information and fail to modulate attention as a function of task demands. We conclude that the source of the social attention impairment in ASD may arise upstream from the amygdala, rather than in the amygdala itself.

SUBMITTER: Birmingham E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3275585 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Comparing social attention in autism and amygdala lesions: effects of stimulus and task condition.

Birmingham Elina E Cerf Moran M Adolphs Ralph R

Social neuroscience 20110926 5-6

The amygdala plays a critical role in orienting gaze and attention to socially salient stimuli. Previous work has demonstrated that SM a patient with rare bilateral amygdala lesions, fails to fixate and make use of information from the eyes in faces. Amygdala dysfunction has also been implicated as a contributing factor in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), consistent with some reports of reduced eye fixations in ASD. Yet, detailed comparisons between ASD and patients with amygdala lesions have no ...[more]

PMID: 21943103

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Project description:People with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have pervasive impairments in social interactions, a diagnostic component that may have its roots in atypical social motivation and attention. One of the brain structures implicated in the social abnormalities seen in ASD is the amygdala. To further characterize the impairment of people with ASD in social attention, and to explore the possible role of the amygdala, we employed a series of visual search tasks with both social (faces and people with different postures, emotions, ages, and genders) and non-social stimuli (e.g., electronics, food, and utensils). We first conducted trial-wise analyses of fixation properties and elucidated visual search mechanisms. We found that an attentional mechanism of initial orientation could explain the detection advantage of non-social targets. We then zoomed into fixation-wise analyses. We defined target-relevant effects as the difference in the percentage of fixations that fell on target-congruent vs. target-incongruent items in the array. In Experiment 1, we tested 8 high-functioning adults with ASD, 3 adults with focal bilateral amygdala lesions, and 19 controls. Controls rapidly oriented to target-congruent items and showed a strong and sustained preference for fixating them. Strikingly, people with ASD oriented significantly less and more slowly to target-congruent items, an attentional deficit especially with social targets. By contrast, patients with amygdala lesions performed indistinguishably from controls. In Experiment 2, we recruited a different sample of 13 people with ASD and 8 healthy controls, and tested them on the same search arrays but with all array items equalized for low-level saliency. The results replicated those of Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, we recruited 13 people with ASD, 8 healthy controls, 3 amygdala lesion patients and another group of 11 controls and tested them on a simpler array. Here our group effect for ASD strongly diminished and all four subject groups showed similar target-relevant effects. These findings argue for an attentional deficit in ASD that is disproportionate for social stimuli, cannot be explained by low-level visual properties of the stimuli, and is more severe with high-load top-down task demands. Furthermore, this deficit appears to be independent of the amygdala, and not evident from general social bias independent of the target-directed search.

Project description:Although reduced social attention and increased nonsocial attention have been reported in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the studies have relied on predominantly male samples and have been underpowered to examine sex differences. These processes may differ for females with ASD, who have been shown to be dissimilar to males in social motivation and nonsocial features, including circumscribed interests (CI). The goal of this study was to compare social and nonsocial visual attention between males and females with ASD on a validated eye-tracking paradigm. Eighty-five school-aged (6-10 years) males and females with and without ASD completed a paired preference task of face and object stimuli (half of which related to common CI). After covarying for chronological and mental age, the presence of concurrently presented CI images reduced prioritization and attention to faces for males more than females, replicating previous findings. ASD females maintained comparable attention patterns to typically developing females, suggesting that previous findings of reduced social attention and increased attention to CI-related objects in autism may be specific to males. These findings are also inconsistent with the "extreme male brain" theory of autism. The more normative orienting and attention to social stimuli for females with ASD may indicate distinct phenotypic characteristics relative to males and possibly serve as a protective effect. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1264-1275. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: As autism is more commonly diagnosed in males, less is known about females with autism. Two areas of interest include the interests held by individuals with autism and how socially motivated they are. We used eye tracking as a way to understand these two areas. Our data reveal that elementary school-aged females (6-10 years) with autism attended to faces comparatively to females without autism, suggesting that (1) they were more socially motivated than males with autism and (2) the images of common interests were less motivating to them.

Dataset Information

Comparing social attention in autism and amygdala lesions: effects of stimulus and task condition.

Publications

Comparing social attention in autism and amygdala lesions: effects of stimulus and task condition.

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