| Popis: |
Differences in both social and sensory processing are well described in the autism literature, but little is known about the causal relationship between these domains, particularly in real-world environments. In the present study, we sought to understand how a core characteristic of the autistic phenotype – reduced social attention – is impacted by the complex multisensory signals present in environments like those encountered in daily life. We tested the hypothesis that autistic group differences in social attention would be magnified by increasing perceptual load (e.g., motion, multisensory cues). Adult participants (N = 40; 19 ASC) explored a diverse set of 360° real-world scenes in a naturalistic, active viewing paradigm (immersive virtual reality + eyetracking). Across three conditions, we systematically varied perceptual load while holding the social and semantic information present in each scene constant. We demonstrate that group differences in social attention are not a static signature of the autistic phenotype; rather, they emerge with increasing perceptual load in naturalistic environments. Crucially, this pattern was specific to the social domain and not driven by low-level oculomotor differences: we did not observe differential impacts of perceptual load on attention directed toward nonsocial semantic (i.e., object, place) information or fixation behavior. This study provides a direct link between social and sensory processing in autism. Moreover, reduced social attention may be an inaccurate characterization of autism. Instead, our results suggest that social attention in autism is better explained by “social vulnerability", particularly to the perceptual load of real-world environments. |
