Visual Integration Mechanisms in Young Adults with High and Low Autistic Traits

Background: Social interaction requires the efficient extraction and integration of visual information. Although atypicalities in global processing and visual perception have been reported in autism, their relationship with self-reported social-skills-related autistic traits remains unclear. Methods: Using an extreme-groups design, 179 university students completed the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Individuals with scores at least ±1 SD were selected to form high-AQ (n = 20) and low-AQ (n = 22) groups. Participants completed two complementary psychophysical tasks assessing object perception under increasing visual noise and global-local visual processing. Results: The high-AQ group showed reduced recognition under high visual noise and slower responses under the global-incongruent condition. In the exploratory regression, visual-noise accuracy explained significant variance when entered alone, whereas global-incongruent Navon performance explained incremental variance and was the only significant unique contributor in the final model (R² = 0.280). Conclusions: These findings suggest that, within the selected extreme-AQ sample, AQ Social Skills scores are associated with complementary visual mechanisms responsible for extracting relevant information from noisy environments and integrating spatially distributed visual information into coherent global representations. These behavioural findings are consistent with a possible link between visual processing and self-reported social traits and with theoretical models proposing a role for magnocellular-dependent dorsal visual computations in social perception, although these neural mechanisms were not directly assessed.