No effect of autistic traits on social attention: evidence based on single-cue and conflicting-cues scenarios

Abstract

Abstract Individuals often use others’ gaze and head directions to direct their attention. To investigate the influence of autistic traits on social attention, we conducted two experiments comparing groups with high and low autistic traits in single-cue (Experiment 1) and conflicting-cue (Experiment 2) scenarios. Our findings indicate that individuals responded more rapidly to the direction of a single social cue or the consensus of multiple cues. However, we did not observe significant differences in social attention between individuals with high and low autistic traits. Notably, as the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) increased, individuals with low autistic traits exhibited greater improvements in reaction speed compared to those with high autistic traits. This suggests that individuals with low autistic traits excel at leveraging temporal information to optimize their behavioral readiness over time, hinting at potential variations in cognitive flexibility related to autistic traits.

Keywords

• Social attention
• Autistic traits
• Cue-target task
• Single-cue
• Conflict-cue scenario