A functional but atypical self: Influence of self-relevant processing on the gaze cueing effect in autism spectrum disorder.
Self-relevant gaze cues still pull attention in autism, but the extra pop from hearing your own name is muted.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Zhao et al. (2018) asked if self-relevant gaze cues shift attention in autism. They ran a lab task with two groups: people with autism and neurotypical people. Each person saw faces that looked left or right. Some faces were labeled with the person's own name, others with a stranger's name.
The task was simple. A cue face looked left or right. Then a target appeared on the left or right. People pressed a key when they saw the target. The team measured how fast people responded. Faster responses meant the gaze cue pulled attention.
What they found
Both groups moved faster when the cue matched the target side. Self-relevant faces sped up responses for everyone. Yet the boost was smaller for people with autism when the target was a voice saying their name. Typical people got a big boost, but the autism group did not.
In short, self-relevant gaze cues work in autism, but the extra kick from hearing your own name is weaker.
How this fits with other research
Walley et al. (2005) first showed that adults with high-functioning autism treat eye gaze like any arrow cue. Zhao et al. (2018) build on this by adding self-relevance. They show that gaze cues still work, but self-voice does not amplify them as much.
Chevallier et al. (2013) found that kids with autism still prioritize direct gaze even when overall social attention is low. This matches the new finding: gaze cues grab attention, yet the boost is atypical.
Chita-Tegmark (2016) pooled 38 eye-tracking studies and found less social looking in autism, especially with many people on screen. Zhao et al. (2018) fit this pattern, but they also show a special case where gaze cues do work—when the face is self-relevant.
Why it matters
You can use self-relevant gaze cues to teach joint attention. Put the learner's name on a face that looks toward the item you want them to notice. Expect a smaller boost if you also use voice prompts. Pair the gaze cue with a tangible reward, as Li et al. (2017) show that reward can still sharpen face attention in autism. Keep the scene simple—Chita-Tegmark (2016) warns that busy social pictures dilute the effect.
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02At a glance
03Original 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.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2018 · doi:10.1002/aur.2019