A functional but atypical self: Influence of self-relevant processing on the gaze cueing effect in autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

The present study aimed to determine whether the impairments in joint attention observed in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in clinical studies were influenced by self-relevant processing. To investigate this possibility, participants were trained to associate two cues (a female face and male face) with distinct words ("self" and "other"). The ASD and typically developing (TD) groups both demonstrated a significant self-relevant effect, responding more quickly to self-pairs than to other pairs. Then, two types of sound (voice and tone) used as targets were manipulated to determine whether the influence of self-relevance on the cueing effect would be similar between individuals with ASD and TD individuals. Individuals with ASD exhibited reduced cueing effect to voice vs. tone targets, whereas TD individuals showed an enhanced cueing effect to voice vs. tone targets when using self-relevant, but not other-relevant, gaze cues. The present results suggest that individuals with ASD exhibit intact self-relevant processing but that the self-relevant processing affects the attentional system of individuals with ASD in a manner different from that of TD individuals and that this difference depends on the self-relevance of the specific target stimuli. Autism Research 2018, 11: 1522-1531. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Observing another person's eye gaze induces attentional shift in the onlooker. Clinical studies have reported that social interaction, including gaze-triggered attention, is impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), while psychological studies have generally reported intact gaze-triggered attention in ASD. This study provided new evidence indicating that gaze-triggered attention is influenced by self-relevant processing in a different manner in ASD individuals than it is in TD individuals. The magnitude of attentional shift triggered by the self-relevant gaze cue was associated with symptom severity in ASD. The functional but atypical self-relevant processing might be able to explain discrepancies in social attention between experimental and real situations.

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder; cueing effect; joint attention; self-relevant processing.