Predator gaze captures both human and chimpanzee attention.

Primates can rapidly detect potential predators and modify their behavior based on the level of risk. The gaze direction of predators is one feature that primates can use to assess risk levels: recognition of a predator's direct stare indicates to prey that it has been detected and the level of risk is relatively high. Predation has likely shaped visual attention in primates to quickly assess the level of risk but we know little about the constellation of low-level (e.

Social attention as a general mechanism? Demonstrating the influence of stimulus content factors on social attentional biasing.

Humans spontaneously attend to faces and eyes. Recent findings, however, suggest that this social attentional biasing may not be driven by the social value of faces but by general factors, like stimulus content, visual context, or task settings. Here, we investigated whether the stimulus content factors of global luminance, featural configuration, and perceived attractiveness may independently drive social attentional biasing.

Infrequent faces bias social attention differently in manual and oculomotor measures.

Although attention is thought to be spontaneously biased by social cues like faces and eyes, recent data have demonstrated that when extraneous content, context, and task factors are controlled, attentional biasing is abolished in manual responses while still occurring sparingly in oculomotor measures. Here, we investigated how social attentional biasing was affected by face novelty by measuring responses to frequently presented (i.e.

Family Experiences of Decreased Sound Tolerance in ASD.

Decreased sound tolerance (DST) is the most common sensory difficulty experienced by autistic individuals. Parents of 88 autistic children and young adults between the ages of 3 and 30 described coping strategies and physical and emotional responses used to deal with distressing sounds, and their impact on daily activities. Loud, sudden, and high-pitched sounds were most commonly endorsed as distressing, most often causing autistic children and young adults to cover their ears or yell, while producing stress, irritation, fear, and anxiety.

Attention capture by trains and faces in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

This study examined involuntary capture of attention, overt attention, and stimulus valence and arousal ratings, all factors that can contribute to potential attentional biases to face and train objects in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the visual domain, faces are particularly captivating, and are thought to have a 'special status' in the attentional system. Research suggests that similar attentional biases may exist for other objects of expertise (e.

Evaluation of a Peer Mentorship Program for Autistic College Students.

Unlabelled: The number of autistic students in colleges is growing rapidly. However, their needs are not being met, and graduation rates among this population remain low. This article describes the implementation and evaluation of the Autism Mentorship Initiative (AMI) for autistic undergraduates (mentees), who received 1-on-1 support from upper-level undergraduate or graduate students (mentors) at their university.

Action coordination during a real-world task: Evidence from children with and without autism spectrum disorder.

"Joint action"-the ability to coordinate actions with others-is critical for achieving individual and interpersonal goals and for our collective success as a species. Joint actions require accurate and rapid inferences about others' goals, intentions, and focus of attention, skills that are thought to be impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Research to date has not investigated joint action abilities in individuals with ASD during real-world social interactions.

Contextually-Based Social Attention Diverges across Covert and Overt Measures.

Humans spontaneously attend to social cues like faces and eyes. However, recent data show that this behavior is significantly weakened when visual content, such as luminance and configuration of internal features, as well as visual context, such as background and facial expression, are controlled. Here, we investigated attentional biasing elicited in response to information presented within appropriate background contexts.

The eyes do not have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes.

It is commonly accepted that attention is spontaneously biased towards faces and eyes. However, the role of stimulus features and task settings in this finding has not yet been systematically investigated. Here, we tested if faces and facial features bias attention spontaneously when stimulus factors, task properties, response conditions, and eye movements are controlled.

Facial Expression Production in Autism: A Meta-Analysis.

This meta-analysis summarized studies that examined group differences on the production of facial expressions in participants with ASD compared to typically developing or nonautistic clinical comparison groups. The overall summary effect from 67 effect sizes representing the average ASD-comparison group differences in facial expressions was -0.481, indicating a moderate effect size.

Exploring emotional expression recognition in aging adults using the Moving Window Technique.

Adult aging is associated with difficulties in recognizing negative facial expressions such as fear and anger. However, happiness and disgust recognition is generally found to be less affected. Eye-tracking studies indicate that the diagnostic features of fearful and angry faces are situated in the upper regions of the face (the eyes), and for happy and disgusted faces in the lower regions (nose and mouth).

How do adults and teens with self-declared Autism Spectrum Disorder experience eye contact? A qualitative analysis of first-hand accounts.

A tendency to avoid eye contact is an early indicator of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and difficulties with eye contact often persist throughout the lifespan. Eye contact difficulties may underlie social cognitive deficits in ASD, and can create significant social and occupational barriers. Thus, this topic has received substantial research and clinical attention.

Spontaneous gaze selection and following during naturalistic social interactions in school-aged children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.

Using a novel naturalistic paradigm allowing participants the freedom to spontaneously select and follow gaze cues in their environment, this study extends previous research conducted with younger children to determine whether school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 17) demonstrate abnormal gaze following relative to typically developing (TD, n = 15) children. The participant and experimenter played a series of games, during which the experimenter pseudorandomly averted her gaze toward a social target (person) or a nonsocial target (object). A significant finding was that, relative to TD children, children with ASD were slower to follow the experimenter's gaze relative to the start of the trial (social targets d = -.

Mentoring University Students with ASD: A Mentee-centered Approach.

This study presents a conceptual understanding of how mentorship is experienced by the participants of a mentorship program for university students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. We interviewed the participants of the Autism Mentorship Initiative at Simon Fraser University. A grounded theory approach was used to systematically organize data from interviews and documents to reveal themes that were salient to the mentees (students with autism; n = 9) and mentors (neurotypical students; n = 9).

Alexithymia, but not autism spectrum disorder, may be related to the production of emotional facial expressions.

Background: A prominent diagnostic criterion of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relates to the abnormal or diminished use of facial expressions. Yet little is known about the mechanisms that contribute to this feature of ASD.

Methods: We showed children with and without ASD emotionally charged video clips in order to parse out individual differences in spontaneous production of facial expressions using automated facial expression analysis software.

Examining the relationship between autistic traits and college adjustment.

We examined the relationship between characteristics associated with autism spectrum disorder and college adjustment in a sample of neurotypical college students. Using the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire and the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire, we found that higher levels of autism spectrum disorder characteristics were associated with poorer adjustment to college. One subscale of the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire, pragmatic language difficulties, explained the most variance in adjustment.

Implicit Social Biases in People With Autism.

Implicit social biases are ubiquitous and are known to influence social behavior. A core diagnostic criterion of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is abnormal social behavior. We investigated the extent to which individuals with ASD might show a specific attenuation of implicit social biases, using Implicit Association Tests (IATs) involving social (gender, race) and nonsocial (nature, shoes) categories.

Eyeing the eyes in social scenes: Evidence for top-down control of stimulus selection in simultanagnosia.

Simultanagnosia is a disorder of visual attention resulting from bilateral parieto-occipital lesions. Healthy individuals look at eyes to infer people's attentional states, but simultanagnosics allocate abnormally few fixations to eyes in scenes. It is unclear why simultanagnosics fail to fixate eyes, but it might reflect that they are (a) unable to locate and fixate them, or (b) do not prioritize attentional states.

The moving window technique: a window into developmental changes in attention during facial emotion recognition.

The strategies children employ to selectively attend to different parts of the face may reflect important developmental changes in facial emotion recognition. Using the Moving Window Technique (MWT), children aged 5-12 years and adults (N = 129) explored faces with a mouse-controlled window in an emotion recognition task. An age-related increase in attention to the left eye emerged at age 11-12 years and reached significance in adulthood.

Comparing social attention in autism and amygdala lesions: effects of stimulus and task condition.

The amygdala plays a critical role in orienting gaze and attention to socially salient stimuli. Previous work has demonstrated that SM a patient with rare bilateral amygdala lesions, fails to fixate and make use of information from the eyes in faces. Amygdala dysfunction has also been implicated as a contributing factor in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), consistent with some reports of reduced eye fixations in ASD.

Experiencing simultanagnosia through windowed viewing of complex social scenes.

Simultanagnosia is a disorder of visual attention, defined as an inability to see more than one object at once. It has been conceived as being due to a constriction of the visual "window" of attention, a metaphor that we examine in the present article. A simultanagnosic patient (SL) and two non-simultanagnosic control patients (KC and ES) described social scenes while their eye movements were monitored.

Opening a window on attention: documenting and simulating recovery from simultanagnosia.

Simultanagnosia is a disorder of visual attention: the inability to see more than one object at one time. Some hypothesize that this is due to a constriction of the visual "window" of attention. Little is known about how simultanagnosics explore complex stimuli and how their behaviour changes with recovery.

At-a-glance monitoring: covert observations of anesthesiologists in the operating room.

Background: Patient monitoring displays are designed to improve patient safety, and yet little is known about how anesthesiologists interact with these displays. Previous studies of clinician behavior used an observer in the operating room, which may have altered behavior. We describe a covert observation technique to determine how often and for how long anesthesiologists actually look at the monitoring display during different segments of the maintenance phase of anesthesia, and to determine whether this changed with more than 1 anesthesia provider or during concomitant activities such as reading.

Saliency does not account for fixations to eyes within social scenes.

We assessed the role of saliency in driving observers to fixate the eyes in social scenes. Saliency maps (Itti & Koch, 2000) were computed for the scenes from three previous studies. Saliency provided a poor account of the data.

Human social attention.

The present chapter suggests that while there is strong evidence that specific brain systems are preferentially biased toward processing gaze information, this specificity is not mirrored by the behavioral data as measured in highly controlled impoverished model tasks. In less controlled tasks, however, such as when observers are left free to look at whatever they want in complex natural scenes, observers focus on people and their eyes. This agrees with one's intuition, and with the neural evidence, that eyes are special.