Intact gesture cueing of attention but attenuated sensitivity to peripheral social targets in autistic children: An eye-tracking and pupillometric study

Background

Altered automatic attention cueing has been reported in autistic children. Yet less is known about how autistic children would respond when the social cue that directs attention occurs in an implied social interaction.

Methods

By using eye-tracking, the current study examined orienting responses to a socially-relevant target or a nonsocial target cued by a goal-directed social gesture in autistic children. Saccadic reaction time and pupillary responses were employed to measure gaze behavior and physiological arousal of autistic children.

Results

Both groups of children showed reflexive orienting to the target regardless of its sociality, whereas typically developing (TD) children exhibited faster gaze shift than autistic children when the target was a social stimulus. An increased pupil dilation was observed in autistic children in response to stimuli relative to TD children. Further, autistic children showed larger baseline pupil response.

Conclusions

Autistic children show attenuated sensitivity to social targets and atypical pupil responses, which may be due to the dysfunction of locus coeruleus (LC) – norepinephrine (NE) system.