A relationship between Autism-Spectrum Quotient and face viewing behavior in 98 participants

Abstract

Faces are one of the most important stimuli that we encounter, but humans vary dramatically in their behavior when viewing a face: some individuals preferentially fixate the eyes, others fixate the mouth, and still others show an intermediate pattern. The determinants of these large individual differences are unknown. However, individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) spend less time fixating the eyes of a viewed face than controls, suggesting the hypothesis that autistic traits in healthy adults might explain individual differences in face viewing behavior. Autistic traits were measured in 98 healthy adults recruited from an academic setting using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, a validated 50-statement questionnaire. Fixations were measured using a video-based eye tracker while participants viewed two different types of audiovisual movies: short videos of talker speaking single syllables and longer videos of talkers speaking sentences in a social context. For both types of movies, there was a positive correlation between Autism-Spectrum Quotient score and percent of time fixating the lower half of the face that explained from 4% to 10% of the variance in individual face viewing behavior. This effect suggests that in healthy adults, autistic traits are one of many factors that contribute to individual differences in face viewing behavior.

The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test Shows Poor Psychometric Properties in a Large, Demographically Representative U.S. Sample

“…Thus, the influence of the stimuli on performance might also extend to individuals who exhibit high levels of autistic traits. This possibility is consistent with recent research showing that members of the general population study who scored higher on the AQ spend more time looking at the bottom half of a face than those with lower AQ scores (Wegner-Clemens et al, 2020).…”

Face masks impede basic and complex emotion recognition: Variation across the broader autism phenotype

“…The conclusion that face masks impair emotion recognition equally for individuals with high and low autistic traits is surprising given that autism and autistic traits in the typical population are linked with a greater reliance of fixating on the mouth and lower parts of the face (Papagiannopoulou et al, 2014;Wegner-Clemens et al, 2020).…”

“…However, there is mixed evidence regarding the possible impact of face masks. In particular, there is evidence that people from the typical population with higher autistic traits tend to spend more time fixating on the lower half of unmasked faces (Wegner‐Clemens et al, 2020). Although Wegner‐Clemens et al (2020) did not explore mask wearing, it appears possible that individuals with higher autistic traits could find face processing more difficult when the lower half of the face is occluded by a face mask.…”

“…In particular, there is evidence that people from the typical population with higher autistic traits tend to spend more time fixating on the lower half of unmasked faces (Wegner‐Clemens et al, 2020). Although Wegner‐Clemens et al (2020) did not explore mask wearing, it appears possible that individuals with higher autistic traits could find face processing more difficult when the lower half of the face is occluded by a face mask. On the other hand, autistic traits demonstrated a small but significant negative correlation with emotion recognition performance in both the full‐face and the condition in which only the upper half of the face was presented (i.e., cropping the lower half rather than overlaying a mask) (Ramachandra & Longacre, 2022).…”

“…Similarly, autistic traits were reliably related to unmasked but not masked face emotion recognition (FER) (McCrackin et al, 2022), whilst those with high autistic traits were equally affected by face masks as those with low autistic traits (Pazhoohi et al, 2021). Thus, this limited direct evidence indicates face masks might in fact not make basic emotion recognition relatively more difficult for those with autistic traits in the general population, despite the widely observed phenomenon of eye-contact avoidance in autism being suggestive that this could be the case (Papagiannopoulou et al, 2014;Wegner-Clemens et al, 2020).…”