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

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.