Face inversion effects in autism: a combined looking time and pupillometric study.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Autism Research

Background:

• Typically developing individuals exhibit performance declines and altered brain responses when viewing inverted faces, attributed to disrupted configural processing.
• Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show reduced inversion effects, suggesting an enhanced featural processing bias.
• No prior research has investigated how this local bias in ASD is reflected in eye movement patterns during face observation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate eye movement patterns, specifically looking time and pupil dilation, during the observation of upright and inverted faces in preschool children with ASD and typically developing controls.
• To determine if a local processing bias in autism spectrum disorder is evident in eye tracking data.

Main Methods:

• An eye tracking study was conducted with preschool children diagnosed with ASD and typically developing children.
• Participants viewed upright and inverted faces, while their looking time and pupil dilation were recorded.
• Analysis focused on comparing gaze patterns and pupillary responses between the two groups and across face orientations.

Main Results:

• Both groups of children looked less at faces and eye regions when presented with inverted compared to upright faces.
• Children with ASD demonstrated a stronger tendency to fixate on the same facial features across both upright and inverted conditions, indicating a local bias.
• Pupil dilation, a measure of processing load, was significantly greater for inverted versus upright faces exclusively in the ASD group, with stronger pupillary inversion effects observed in ASD.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that children with ASD exhibit a local bias in face processing, prioritizing featural information over configural information.
• This local bias is reflected in their eye movement strategies and is associated with an increased cognitive processing load when encountering inverted faces.
• The results support the hypothesis of enhanced featural processing in autism spectrum disorder and provide novel insights into the underlying oculomotor and cognitive mechanisms.