Looking you in the mouth: abnormal gaze in autism resulting from impaired top-down modulation of visual attention

People with autism are impaired in their social behavior, including their eye contact with others, but the processes that underlie this impairment remain elusive. We combined high-resolution eye tracking with computational modeling in a group of 10 high-functioning individuals with autism to address...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social cognitive and affective neuroscience Vol. 1; no. 3; pp. 194 - 202
Main Authors: Neumann, Dirk, Spezio, Michael L., Piven, Joseph, Adolphs, Ralph
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: England Oxford University Press 01.12.2006
Subjects:
Adult
Attention
Autism
Autistic Disorder - psychology
Eye Movements
Facial Expression
Female
Fixation, Ocular
Humans
Male
Mouth
Psychology - statistics & numerical data
Special Issue
Visual Perception
high-functioning autism
attention
eye movements
saliency
ISSN:1749-5016, 1749-5024, 1749-5024
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:People with autism are impaired in their social behavior, including their eye contact with others, but the processes that underlie this impairment remain elusive. We combined high-resolution eye tracking with computational modeling in a group of 10 high-functioning individuals with autism to address this issue. The group fixated the location of the mouth in facial expressions more than did matched controls, even when the mouth was not shown, even in faces that were inverted and most noticeably at latencies of 200–400 ms. Comparisons with a computational model of visual saliency argue that the abnormal bias for fixating the mouth in autism is not driven by an exaggerated sensitivity to the bottom-up saliency of the features, but rather by an abnormal top-down strategy for allocating visual attention.
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ISSN:1749-5016
1749-5024
1749-5024
DOI:10.1093/scan/nsl030