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Enhanced Visual Search in Infancy Predicts Emerging Autism Symptoms.

ABSTRACT: In addition to core symptoms, i.e., social interaction and communication difficulties and restricted and repetitive behaviors, autism is also characterized by aspects of superior perception. One well-replicated finding is that of superior performance in visual search tasks, in which participants have to indicate the presence of an odd-one-out element among a number of foils. Whether these aspects of superior perception contribute to the emergence of core autism symptoms remains debated. Perceptual and social interaction atypicalities could reflect co-expressed but biologically independent pathologies, as suggested by a "fractionable" phenotype model of autism. A developmental test of this hypothesis is now made possible by longitudinal cohorts of infants at high risk, such as of younger siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Around 20% of younger siblings are diagnosed with autism themselves, and up to another 30% manifest elevated levels of autism symptoms. We used eye tracking to measure spontaneous orienting to letter targets (O, S, V, and +) presented among distractors (the letter X; Figure 1). At 9 and 15 months, emerging autism symptoms were assessed using the Autism Observation Scale for Infants (AOSI;), and at 2 years of age, they were assessed using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS;). Enhanced visual search performance at 9 months predicted a higher level of autism symptoms at 15 months and at 2 years. Infant perceptual atypicalities are thus intrinsically linked to the emerging autism phenotype.

SUBMITTER: Gliga T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4502951 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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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.

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Enhanced Visual Search in Infancy Predicts Emerging Autism Symptoms.

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