Temporal Profiles of Social Attention Are Different Across Development in Autistic and Neurotypical People
EU-AIMS LEAP group
(2021) Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, volume 6, issue 8, pp. 813 - 824
(Article)
Abstract
Background: Sociocommunicative difficulties, including abnormalities in eye contact, are core diagnostic features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Many studies have used eye tracking to measure reduced attention to faces in autistic people; however, most of this work has not taken advantage of eye-tracking temporal resolution to examine temporal profiles of
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attention. Methods: We used growth curve analysis to model attention to static social scenes as a function of time in a large (N = 650) sample of autistic participants and neurotypical participants across a wide age range (6–30 years). Results: The model yielded distinct temporal profiles of attention to faces in the groups. Initially, both groups showed a relatively high probability of attending to faces, followed by decline after several seconds. The neurotypical participants, however, were significantly more likely to return their attention to faces in the latter part of each 20-second trial, with increasing probability with age. In contrast, the probability of returning to the face in the autistic participants remained low across development. In participants with ASD, more atypical profiles of attention were associated with lower Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales communication scores and a higher curvature in one data-driven cluster correlated with symptom severity. Conclusions: These findings show that social attention not only is reduced in ASD, but also differs in its temporal dynamics. The neurotypical participants became more sophisticated in how they deployed their social attention across age, a pattern that was significantly reduced in the participants with ASD, possibly reflecting delayed acquisition of social expertise.
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Keywords: Autism spectrum disorder, Eye tracking, Growth curve analysis, Social attention, Social motivation, Stratification, Clinical Neurology, Biological Psychiatry, Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging, Journal Article
ISSN: 2451-9022
Publisher: Elsevier Inc.
Note: Funding Information: This work was supported by the UK Medical Research Council (to LM, TC, MHJ, and EJ), Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking Grant No. 115300 (to LM, TC, JT, EL, HH, JB, MHJ, EJ, and the members of the EU-AIMS LEAP Group) for the EU-AIMS project, and Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking Grant No. 777394 (to TDB, LM, TC, JT, EL, HH, JB, MHJ, and EJ) for the AIMS-2-TRIALS project. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, Autism Speaks, Autistica, and Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Funding Information: This work was supported by the UK Medical Research Council (to LM, TC, MHJ, and EJ), Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking Grant No. 115300 (to LM, TC, JT, EL, HH, JB, MHJ, EJ, and the members of the EU-AIMS LEAP Group) for the EU-AIMS project, and Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking Grant No. 777394 (to TDB, LM, TC, JT, EL, HH, JB, MHJ, and EJ) for the AIMS-2-TRIALS project. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, Autism Speaks, Autistica, and Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. We thank the participants and the families that took part in the LEAP study. JT is a paid consultant to F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG. JB has been in the past 3 years a consultant to/member of advisory board of/and/or speaker for Janssen Cilag BV, Eli Lilly, Lundbeck, Shire, Roche, Novartis, Medice, and Servier. He is not an employee of any of these companies and not a stock shareholder of any of these companies. He has no other financial or material support, including expert testimony, patents, and royalties. FS is a paid consultant and scientific advisor to F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG and Janssen Pharmaceutica. Sven Bölte receives royalties for the German and Swedish KOTDAKT manuals and adaptations of the ADI-R, ADOS, and SRS from Hogrefe Publishers. He has in the last 3 years acted as an author, consultant, or lecturer for Shire, Medice, Roche, Eli Lilly, Prima Psychiatry, GLGroup, System Analytic, Kompetento, Expo Medica, and Prophase and receives royalties for text books and diagnostic tolls from Huber/Hogrefe, Kohlhammer, and UTB. Lindsay Ham, Xavier Liogier D'Ardhuy, Joerg Hipp, Pilar Garcés, and Will Spooren are employees at F. Hoffmann-La Roche LTD. Gahan Pandina is an employee at Janssen. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg has received consultant fees and travel expenses from Alexza Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Defined Health, Decision Resources, Desitin Arzneimittel, Elsevier, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Gerson Lehrman Group, Grupo Ferrer, Les Laboratoires Servier, Lilly Deutschland, Lundbeck Foundation, Outcome Sciences, Outcome Europe, PriceSpective, and Roche Pharma; and has received speaker's fees from Abbott, AstraZeneca, BASF, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen-Cilag, Lundbeck, Pfizer Pharma, and Servier Deutschland. Tobias Banaschewski has served in an advisory or consultancy role for Actelion, Hexal Pharma, Lilly, Medice, Novartis, Oxford Outcomes, Otsuka, PCM Scientific, Shire, and Vifor Pharma. He has received conference support or speaker fees from Medice, Novartis, and Shire. He is/has been involved in clinical trials conducted by Shire and Vifor Pharma. He has received royalties from Hogrefe, Kohlhammer, CIP Medien, and Oxford University Press. The present work is unrelated to the above grants and relationships. All other authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 Society of Biological Psychiatry
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