Social Anxiety Reduces Visual Attention to the Eyes of Emotional Faces in Autistic Youth.

Autism and social anxiety (SA) share behavioral features like reduced eye contact, variable social attention, and differences in social interactions. However, the impact of the co-occurrence of these conditions (e.g.

Spatiotemporal Eye Movement Dynamics Reveal Altered Face Prioritization in Early Visual Processing Among Autistic Children.

Background: Reduced social attention-looking at faces-is one of the most common manifestations of social difficulty in autism that is central to social development. Although reduced social attention is well characterized in autism, qualitative differences in how social attention unfolds across time remains unknown.

Methods: We used a computational modeling (i.

Autistic Individuals Do Not Alter Visual Processing Strategy During Encoding Versus Recognition of Faces: A Hidden Markov Modeling Approach.

Purpose: Visual face recognition-the ability to encode, discriminate, and recognize the faces of others-is fundamentally supported by eye movements and is a common source of difficulty for autistic individuals. We aimed to evaluate how visual processing strategies (i.e.

Social Anhedonia Accounts for Greater Variance in Internalizing Symptoms than Autism Symptoms in Autistic and Non-Autistic Youth.

Purpose: Social anhedonia is a transdiagnostic trait that reflects reduced pleasure from social interaction. It has historically been associated with autism, however, very few studies have directly examined behavioral symptoms of social anhedonia in autistic youth. We investigated rates of social anhedonia in autistic compared to non-autistic youth and the relative contributions of autism and social anhedonia symptoms to co-occurring mental health.

Social visual attention as a treatment outcome: evaluating the social games for autistic adolescents (SAGA) intervention.

A core feature of autism involves difficulty perceiving and interpreting eye gaze shifts as nonverbal communicative signals. A hypothesis about the origins of this phenotype is that it emerges from developmentally different social visual attention (SVA). We developed Social Games for Autistic Adolescents (SAGA; Scherf et al.

Investigating the Face Inversion Effect in Autism Across Behavioral and Neural Measures of Face Processing: A Systematic Review and Bayesian Meta-Analysis.

Importance: Face processing is foundational to human social cognition, is central to the hallmark features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and shapes neural systems and social behavior. Highly efficient and specialized, the face processing system is sensitive to inversion, demonstrated by reduced accuracy in recognition and altered neural response to inverted faces. Understanding at which mechanistic level the autistic face processing system may be particularly different, as measured by the face inversion effect, will improve overall understanding of brain functioning in autism.

Memory and creativity: A meta-analytic examination of the relationship between memory systems and creative cognition.

Increasing evidence suggests that specific memory systems (e.g., semantic vs.

A multilevel Bayesian meta-analysis of the body inversion effect: Evaluating controversies over headless and sexualized bodies.

Face and body perception rely on specialized processing mechanisms to interpret social information efficiently. The body inversion effect (BIE), refers to an inversion effect for bodies, such that recognition of bodies is impaired by inversion. The BIE, like the face inversion effect (FIE), is particularly important because a disproportionate BIE relative to inversion effects for objects could be interpreted in much the same way as the disproportionate FIE has often been characterized; that is, as evidence of specialized, configural processing.

The lack of statistical power of subgroup analyses in meta-analyses: a cautionary note.

One of the most used methods to examine sources of heterogeneity in meta-analyses is the so-called 'subgroup analysis'. In a subgroup analysis, the included studies are divided into two or more subgroups, and it is tested whether the pooled effect sizes found in these subgroups differ significantly from each other. Subgroup analyses can be considered as a core component of most published meta-analyses.

The Episodic Memory Profile in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Bayesian Meta-Analysis.

Although autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are commonly characterized by diminished episodic memory, the literature in this area is mixed. We address these inconsistent findings by employing multilevel Bayesian meta-analysis to quantify episodic memory differences between individuals with ASD and typically developing (TD) controls. We used meta-regression to evaluate the effects of test modality (e.

Does decreased visual attention to faces underlie difficulties interpreting eye gaze cues in autism?

Background: Shifts in eye gaze communicate social information that allows people to respond to another's behavior, interpret motivations driving behavior, and anticipate subsequent behavior. Understanding the social communicative nature of gaze shifts requires the ability to link eye movements and mental state information about objects in the world. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical sensitivity to eye gaze cues, which impacts social communication and relationships.

Quantifying the face inversion effect in nonhuman primates: a phylogenetic meta-analysis.

Face recognition is important for primate social cognition, enabling rapid discrimination between faces and objects. In humans, face recognition is characterized by certain cognitive specializations such as face-specific sensitivity to upright faces. The face inversion effect reflects the disproportionate inversion cost (i.

Improving sensitivity to eye gaze cues in autism using serious game technology: study protocol for a phase I randomised controlled trial.

Introduction: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by impairments in social communication. Core symptoms are deficits in social looking behaviours, including limited and We designed an intervention game using serious game mechanics for adolescents with ASD. It is designed to train individuals with ASD to discover that the eyes, and shifts in gaze specifically, provide information about the external world.

Third party observer effect: Application to autistic traits in the normal population.

This study examined how autistic traits relate to third-party observation during neuropsychological testing. Using a counterbalanced within-subjects design (N = 61), we manipulated the absence and presence of third-party observation when administering alternate forms of the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test to individuals with variable autistic traits. Bayesian linear mixed effects modeling was used to examine the interaction between autistic traits and third-party observation on test performance.

The effects of age on the learning and forgetting of primacy, middle, and recency components of a multi-trial word list.

The serial position effect reveals that recall of a supraspan list of words follows a predictable pattern, whereby words at the beginning (primacy) and end (recency) of a list are recalled more easily than words in the middle. This effect has typically been studied using single list-learning trials, but in neuropsychology, multi-trial list-learning tests are more commonly used. The current study examined trends in learning for primacy, middle, and recency effects across multiple trials in younger and older age cohorts.

The effectiveness and unique contribution of neuropsychological tests and the δ latent phenotype in the differential diagnosis of dementia in the uniform data set.

Objective: Two main approaches to the interpretation of cognitive test performance have been utilized for the characterization of disease: evaluating shared variance across tests, as with measures of severity, and evaluating the unique variance across tests, as with pattern and error analysis. Both methods provide necessary information, but the unique contributions of each are rarely considered. This study compares the 2 approaches on their ability to differentially diagnose with accuracy, while controlling for the influence of other relevant demographic and risk variables.