Deconstructing atypical eye gaze perception in autism spectrum disorder.

The ability to discern the target of another person's gaze is critical for social and linguistic development, but functions atypically in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A multi-pronged approach allowed us to deconstruct this complex ability, to uncover the fundamental bases of this impairment. We analyzed performance on a novel gaze perception task with classical psychophysical metrics (precision and accuracy), principal component analysis (in the analysis of spatial biases), and Bayesian computational modeling (in the analysis of individual subjects' use of contextual salience cues).

Autism does not limit strategic thinking in the "beauty contest" game.

A popular hypothesis in developmental psychology is that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a specific impairment or developmental delay in their ability to reason about other people's mental processes, especially when this reasoning process is of a higher-order, recursive, or nested variety. One type of interpersonal interaction that involves this sort of complex reasoning about others' minds is an economic game, and because economic games have been extensively modeled in behavioral economics, they provide a unique testbed for a quantitative and precise analysis of cognitive functioning in ASD. This study specifically asked whether ASD is associated with strategic depth in the economic game known as The Beauty Contest, in which all players submit a number from 0 to 100, and the winner is the player who submits the number closest to 2/3 of the mean of all numbers submitted.

The influence of presentation modality on the social comprehension of naturalistic scenes in adults with autism spectrum disorder.

The comprehension of dynamically unfolding social situations is made possible by the seamless integration of multimodal information merged with rich intuitions about the thoughts and behaviors of others. We examined how high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder and neurotypical controls made a complex social judgment (i.e.

Prior expectations about where other people are likely to direct their attention systematically influence gaze perception.

Different locations in the visual environment vary greatly in terms of how likely they are to draw a person's attention. When inferring the most likely target of another person's gaze, it would therefore be a reasonable strategy to incorporate expectations about the relative visual salience of these various locations, weighing this prior knowledge against incoming social signals (e.g.

Viewing Complex, Dynamic Scenes "Through the Eyes" of Another Person: The Gaze-Replay Paradigm.

We present a novel "Gaze-Replay" paradigm that allows the experimenter to directly test how particular patterns of visual input-generated from people's actual gaze patterns-influence the interpretation of the visual scene. Although this paradigm can potentially be applied across domains, here we applied it specifically to social comprehension. Participants viewed complex, dynamic scenes through a small window displaying only the foveal gaze pattern of a gaze "donor.

Estimation of the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder in South Korea, revisited.

Two-phase designs in epidemiological studies of autism prevalence introduce methodological complications that can severely limit the precision of resulting estimates. If the assumptions used to derive the prevalence estimate are invalid or if the uncertainty surrounding these assumptions is not properly accounted for in the statistical inference procedure, then the point estimate may be inaccurate and the confidence interval may not be a true reflection of the precision of the estimate. We examine these potential pitfalls in the context of a recent high-profile finding by Kim et al.

A specific hypoactivation of right temporo-parietal junction/posterior superior temporal sulcus in response to socially awkward situations in autism.

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulty comprehending social situations in the complex, dynamic contexts encountered in the real world. To study the social brain under conditions which approximate naturalistic situations, we measured brain activity with FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING: while participants watched a full-length episode of the sitcom The Office. Having quantified the degree of social awkwardness at each moment of the episode, as judged by an independent sample of controls, we found that both individuals with ASD and control participants showed reliable activation of several brain regions commonly associated with social perception and cognition (e.

Inferring the intentional states of autonomous virtual agents.

Inferring the mental states of other agents, including their goals and intentions, is a central problem in cognition. A critical aspect of this problem is that one cannot observe mental states directly, but must infer them from observable actions. To study the computational mechanisms underlying this inference, we created a two-dimensional virtual environment populated by autonomous agents with independent cognitive architectures.

Exploring the mental space of autonomous intentional agents.

The ability to infer the intentions of other agents on the basis of their motion is a critical psychological faculty. In the present study, we examine a key question underlying this process, namely: What are the psychologically natural categories of intentional agents and actions? To investigate this question empirically, we use displays containing a number of autonomous, independently programmed agents moving about a two-dimensional environment and interacting with one another. Each agent behaves according to its own simple program, controlled by a small number of parameters that define its "personality.

Why are some people's names easier to learn than others? The effects of face similarity on memory for face-name associations.

Using synthetic faces that varied along four perceptual dimensions (Wilson, Loffler, & Wilkinson, 2002), we examined the effects of face similarity on memory for face-name associations. The nature of these stimuli allowed us to go beyond the categorical similarity manipulations used in previous verbal associative memory studies to trace out the parametric relation between similarity and various performance measures. In Experiment 1, we found that recall performance diminished as a function of how many studied faces were in the vicinity of the cue face in similarity space.