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Preference for Social Motion in Autistic Adults.
Magdalena Matyjek1,2, Nico Bast3, Salvador Soto Faraco1,4
1Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Psychophysiology
|April 17, 2025
Summary
Autistic adults show less attention to social stimuli compared to non-autistic adults. This suggests persistent differences in social attention, impacting cognitive processing and arousal, across the lifespan in autism.
Area of Science:
- Neurodevelopmental disorders
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Social cognition
Background:
- Autism is characterized by social attention deficits, with reduced preference for biological motion noted in children.
- This social attention bias is a potential early marker for autism, but its persistence into adulthood is understudied.
- The cognitive mechanisms underlying these differences remain largely unknown.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate differences in visual preference and pupillary responses to social versus geometric motion in autistic and non-autistic adults.
- To explore the cognitive underpinnings of social attention differences in autism using pupillometry.
- To determine if social attention biases observed in childhood autism persist into adulthood.
Main Methods:
- Comparison of looking preferences between autistic and non-autistic adults when presented with social and geometric motion stimuli.
- Measurement of pupillary responses (pupil dilation) as an index of cognitive effort and arousal during stimulus presentation.
- Utilized a sample of 66 adults, comprising both autistic and non-autistic participants.
Main Results:
- Autistic adults exhibited a significantly reduced spontaneous looking preference for social stimuli compared to non-autistic adults.
- While non-autistic adults showed a strong preference for social motion, autistic adults displayed no clear preference between social and geometric motion.
- Autistic adults demonstrated faster and larger pupil dilation to social motion, indicating heightened cognitive engagement and arousal.
Conclusions:
- Social attention differences, including a reduced preference for social stimuli, persist from childhood into adulthood in autism.
- Pupillary responses suggest heightened cognitive effort and arousal in autistic adults when processing social motion.
- These findings highlight enduring alterations in social attention and its cognitive correlates across the lifespan in autism spectrum disorder.
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