Threatening faces fail to guide attention for adults with autistic-like traits.
High autistic-like traits in typical adults create the same threat-detection blink seen in autism.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked adults to spot angry faces during a rapid picture stream.
People first answered a survey to measure autistic-like traits.
The team compared high-trait and low-trait adults on accuracy.
What they found
High-trait adults missed more angry faces than low-trait peers.
The gap shows the same attention blink seen in diagnosed autism.
How this fits with other research
Williams et al. (2010) found no attention blink in adults with autism.
The new study finds a blink in neurotypical adults who simply act autistic.
The clash is about who you test: diagnosed autism versus personality traits.
Remington et al. (2012) and Griffith et al. (2012) showed that faces grab less attention in autism.
Ivy et al. (2017) now show the same pattern for threatening faces in trait-carrying adults.
KAgiovlasitis et al. (2025) in India also link higher traits to less social gaze, backing universality.
Why it matters
If a client has high autistic traits but no diagnosis, still expect slower threat detection.
Slow detection can mimic safety-skills deficits, so allow extra response time.
Use clear, steady cues instead of rapid-fire visuals when teaching safety.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals diagnosed with autistic spectrum conditions often show deficits in processing emotional faces relative to neurotypical peers. However, little is known about whether similar deficits exist in neurotypical individuals who show high-levels of autistic-like traits. To address this question, we compared performance on an attentional blink task in a large sample of adults who showed low- or high-levels of autistic-like traits on the Autism Spectrum Quotient. We found that threatening faces inserted as the second target in a rapid serial visual presentation were identified more accurately among individuals with low- compared to high-levels of autistic-like traits. This is the first study to show that attentional blink abnormalities seen in autism extend to the neurotypical population with autistic-like traits, adding to the growing body of research suggesting that autistic-related patterns of behaviors extend into a subset of the neurotypical population. Autism Res 2017, 10: 311-320. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1658