Autistic differences in the temporal dynamics of social attention
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Summary
This study investigates the temporal dynamics of social attention in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to neurotypical (NT) adults. While previous research has established that individuals with ASD exhibit reduced visual attention to social stimuli, it has largely relied on aggregated metrics that obscure how gaze behavior evolves over time. The authors aimed to characterize these moment-to-moment changes to determine when group differences emerge and whether they relate to autistic traits, thereby refining behavioral phenotypes and theories of social attention in ASD. The researchers employed a passive eye-tracking paradigm with 30 NT adults and 23 adults with ASD. Participants viewed competing pairs of social (happy groups of people) and non-social (food, scenery, money) images for 5 seconds per trial. Stimuli were matched for low-level properties and affective valence, and included both intact and phase-scrambled versions to control for sensory confounds. Gaze data were analyzed using generalized linear mixed effects models and temporal modeling via orthogonal polynomials to capture the shape of gaze trajectories over time. The results revealed distinct temporal profiles for the two groups. NT observers exhibited a complex trajectory characterized by an initial increase in social attention, followed by a decay, and a subsequent recovery of social gaze after prolonged viewing. In contrast, individuals with ASD showed a linear decay in social attention over time, with no recovery phase; their bias toward social stimuli diminished to the point of reversing toward non-social stimuli by the end of the trial. Statistical analysis indicated that group differences became robustly detectable only in the final 2.3 seconds of the trial. Furthermore, individual variation in autistic traits, measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), predicted these temporal patterns, with higher AQ scores correlating with the linear decay profile. These differences were not explained by age or IQ. The findings suggest that the "gaze cascade" effect, which maintains social attention in NT observers through a recovery phase, is disrupted in individuals with high autistic traits. The study concludes that reduced social attention in ASD is not merely a static deficit but involves a failure to sustain or recover attention to social stimuli over time. This implies that individuals with ASD may exhibit reduced responsivity to the reward value of social stimuli. The authors argue that incorporating temporal components into gaze analysis provides a more precise understanding of social attention mechanisms in autism than traditional aggregated metrics.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| archive | success | openalex | — | — | 5 | 2026-06-26 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-19 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-26; verification: verified.
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