Real-World Visual Search in Autistic Individuals

Recent research has shown that as compared with neurotypicals, autistic individuals have poorer performance and lower eye movement consistency in face recognition, which are associated with Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) Social Skill. Here we showed that this phenomenon was not observed in visual search tasks, as autistic individuals and matched neurotypicals had similar hit rate and precision as well as eye movement pattern and consistency when searching for either social (human) or non-social (vehicle) stimuli in either low complexity or high complexity real-world scenes. However, autistic individuals had longer search time and made a larger number of fixations with longer fixation durations, suggesting lower efficiency in identifying potential targets. The longer search time and larger number of fixations were both uniquely predicted by AQ Details/Patterns beyond associated cognitive ability measures, suggesting their relevance to autistic traits of restrictive and repetitive behavior. This difficulty was not limited to social stimuli, supporting a domain-general view of deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Thus, the manifestation of autistic individuals’ processing difficulties may depend on the task demands and related traits, with important implications for the behavioral markers and core mechanisms of ASD.