Are social interactions preferentially attended in real-world scenes? Evidence from change blindness.

In change detection paradigms, changes to social or animate aspects of a scene are detected better and faster compared with non-social or inanimate aspects. While previous studies have focused on how changes to individual faces/bodies are detected, it is possible that individuals presented within a social interaction may be further prioritised, as the accurate interpretation of social interactions may convey a competitive advantage. Over three experiments, we explored change detection to complex real-world scenes, in which changes either occurred by the removal of (a) an individual on their own, (b) an individual who was interacting with others, or (c) an object.

Autistic Adults are Not Impaired at Maintaining or Switching Between Counterfactual and Factual Worlds: An ERP Study.

We report an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment that tests whether autistic adults are able to maintain and switch between counterfactual and factual worlds. Participants (N = 48) read scenarios that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, then either maintained the counterfactual world or switched back to the factual world. When the context maintained the world, participants showed appropriate detection of the inconsistent critical word.

Perspective influences eye movements during real-life conversation: Mentalising about self versus others in autism.

Previous lab-based studies suggest that autistic individuals are less attentive to social aspects of their environment. In our study, we recorded the eye movements of autistic and typically developing adults while they engaged in a real-life social interaction with a partner. Results showed that autistic adults were less likely than typically developing adults to look at the experimenter's face, and instead were more likely to look at the background.

Emotional Processing of Ironic Versus Literal Criticism in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults: Evidence From Eye-Tracking.

Typically developing adults are able to keep track of story characters' emotional states online while reading. Filik et al. showed that initially, participants expected the victim to be more hurt by ironic comments than literal, but later considered them less hurtful; ironic comments were regarded as more amusing.

Autistic adults anticipate and integrate meaning based on the speaker's voice: Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials.

Typically developing (TD) individuals rapidly integrate information about a speaker and their intended meaning while processing sentences online. We examined whether the same processes are activated in autistic adults and tested their timecourse in 2 preregistered experiments. Experiment 1 employed the visual world paradigm.

Anti-gay "Honor" Abuse: A Multinational Attitudinal Study of Collectivist- Versus Individualist-Orientated Populations in Asia and England.

Cultural collectivism, a core feature of honor cultures, is associated with the acceptance of aggression if it is used in the name of so-called "honor." Currently overlooked in the research literature, this study explored perceptions of antigay "honor" abuse in collectivist-orientated honor cultures, where homosexuality, in particular, is considered to be dishonorable. To conduct exploratory and comparative analysis, this study recruited 922 students in four Asian countries (India, Iran, Malaysia, and Pakistan), as well as Asian British and White British students in England.

Intact counterfactual emotion processing in autism spectrum disorder: Evidence from eye-tracking.

Counterfactual emotions, such as regret and relief, require an awareness of how things could have been different. We report a preregistered experiment that examines how adults with and without ASD process counterfactual emotions in real-time, based on research showing that the developmental trajectory of counterfactual thinking may be disrupted in people with ASD. Participants were eye-tracked as they read narratives in which a character made an explicit decision then subsequently experienced either a mildly negative or positive outcome.