The spectrum of attitudes towards the spectrum of autism and its relationship to psychological distress in mothers of children with autism.

LAY ABSTRACT: Mothers of children on the autism spectrum experience high levels of emotional distress. Mothers cope with stress by having their own thoughts and opinions about their children. In this study, we tested whether the way mothers perceive autism may contribute to the level of distress they feel. Some mothers see autism as a developmental disorder that needs to be cured, but some see autism as a type of mind that needs to be accepted. Our findings showed that mothers who see autism more as a type of mind are generally less stressed. But we also showed that it matters how severe are the child's symptoms, and how heavy was the perceived burden of caring for the child. These results imply that it is worth working on attitudes towards autism to help mothers cope better. But at the same time, we argue that mothers should not be judged for their perceptions of autism, as there is a huge spectrum of a child's characteristics and family's life circumstances.

Looking through rainbow-rimmed glasses: Taking neurodiversity perspective is related to subjective well-being of autistic adults.

LAY ABSTRACT: Autistic adults experience a high level of distress. Finding new ways to support their well-being is an important goal for researchers and clinicians. We assessed the way autistic adults view their autism, as a disorder or as a type of mind (neurodiversity), and the level they integrate with other autistic people, and we checked how those factors contribute to their well-being. People who see autism rather as a type of mind than as a disorder had higher self-esteem. People who view themselves as more similar to other autistic people felt more stressed, but this result was not accurate for people who view autism as a type of mind. Clinicians should be sensitive to the way autistic people understand autism and to what extent they identify with the autism community, because it may relate to their well-being.

Eye movement anomalies as a source of diagnostic information in decision process analysis.

As deviations from what is expected, anomalies are typically seen as an obstruction to making good predictions or an impulse to revise the predictive framework. Here, we consider a different possibility-that anomalies, particularly those related to cognitive processing, may be a valuable source of diagnostic information. More specifically, we hypothesize that the extent to which the prechoice information search has been atypical (anomalous) can be used to reverse-infer important latent features of the decision process. For instance, based on atypicalities in how juries examine courtroom evidence, can we infer if they were biased by media reports; or if financial traders browsed public stock market data in a way sufficiently unusual to indicate access to insider information? In our preregistered experiment, participants viewed expert opinions about financial stocks, before deciding whether to invest and get paid according to the subsequent market return, adjusted by an independent random amount. We used eye-tracking and machine-learning dimensionality reduction and anomaly detection techniques to measure the extent to which eye-movements while viewing opinions were idiosyncratic/anomalous. We found that nudging participants by disclosing the return adjustment value beforehand (thus giving them "privileged information") made their patterns of subsequently viewing opinions more idiosyncratic. With those idiosyncrasies as potential markers of top-down attentional control, we demonstrated a reverse-inference of motivation and prior knowledge from attention, predicting if people were nudged in a particular direction based on how idiosyncratically they then searched for information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Scanpath similarity measure reveals not only a decreased social preference, but also an increased nonsocial preference in individuals with autism.

We compared scanpath similarity in response to repeated presentations of social and nonsocial images representing natural scenes in a sample of 30 participants with autism spectrum disorder and 32 matched typically developing individuals. We used scanpath similarity (calculated using ScanMatch) as a novel measure of attentional bias or preference, which constrains eye-movement patterns by directing attention to specific visual or semantic features of the image. We found that, compared with the control group, scanpath similarity of participants with autism was significantly higher in response to nonsocial images, and significantly lower in response to social images. Moreover, scanpaths of participants with autism were more similar to scanpaths of other participants with autism in response to nonsocial images, and less similar in response to social images. Finally, we also found that in response to nonsocial images, scanpath similarity of participants with autism did not decline with stimulus repetition to the same extent as in the control group, which suggests more perseverative attention in the autism spectrum disorder group. These results show a preferential fixation on certain elements of social stimuli in typically developing individuals compared with individuals with autism, and on certain elements of nonsocial stimuli in the autism spectrum disorder group, compared with the typically developing group.

Silent shapes and shapeless sounds: the robustness of the diminished crossmodal correspondences effect in autism spectrum conditions.

We performed a registered replication of the Oberman and Ramachandran (Soc Neurosci 3(3-4):348-355, 2008) study on the 'kiki/bouba' effect in autism spectrum conditions (ASC). The aim of the study was to test the robustness of the diminished crossmodal correspondences effect in autism, but also to verify whether this effect is not an artifact of differences in intelligence. We tested a Polish-speaking sample of 21 participants with ADOS-confirmed autism spectrum conditions (mean age 15.90) and 21 age- (mean age 15.86), sex- and IQ-matched neurotypical control participants. Procedure closely followed the replicated study. Participants' task was to match five pairs of unfamiliar words and shapes. Matching words and shapes had similar supramodal characteristics that allowed the match. We report partial replication of the diminished 'kiki/bouba' effect in individuals with ASC compared to the neurotypical control group. However, we found that nonverbal intelligence also significantly contributed to task performance, but only in participants with autism, suggesting a compensatory role of intelligence. Finally, the effect of autism severity (measured by ADOS classification) was significant-crossmodal correspondences were weaker in individuals with autism, compared to those with autism spectrum diagnosis.

The right look for the job: decoding cognitive processes involved in the task from spatial eye-movement patterns.

The aim of the study was not only to demonstrate whether eye-movement-based task decoding was possible but also to investigate whether eye-movement patterns can be used to identify cognitive processes behind the tasks. We compared eye-movement patterns elicited under different task conditions, with tasks differing systematically with regard to the types of cognitive processes involved in solving them. We used four tasks, differing along two dimensions: spatial (global vs. local) processing (Navon, Cognit Psychol, 9(3):353-383 1977) and semantic (deep vs. shallow) processing (Craik and Lockhart, J Verbal Learn Verbal Behav, 11(6):671-684 1972). We used eye-movement patterns obtained from two time periods: fixation cross preceding the target stimulus and the target stimulus. We found significant effects of both spatial and semantic processing, but in case of the latter, the effect might be an artefact of insufficient task control. We found above chance task classification accuracy for both time periods: 51.4% for the period of stimulus presentation and 34.8% for the period of fixation cross presentation. Therefore, we show that task can be to some extent decoded from the preparatory eye-movements before the stimulus is displayed. This suggests that anticipatory eye-movements reflect the visual scanning strategy employed for the task at hand. Finally, this study also demonstrates that decoding is possible even from very scant eye-movement data similar to Coco and Keller, J Vis 14(3):11-11 (2014). This means that task decoding is not limited to tasks that naturally take longer to perform and yield multi-second eye-movement recordings.

A novel machine learning analysis of eye-tracking data reveals suboptimal visual information extraction from facial stimuli in individuals with autism.

We propose a new method of quantifying the utility of visual information extracted from facial stimuli for emotion recognition. The stimuli are convolved with a Gaussian fixation distribution estimate, revealing more information in those facial regions the participant fixated on. Feeding this convolution to a machine-learning emotion recognition algorithm yields an error measure (between actual and predicted emotions) reflecting the quality of extracted information. We recorded the eye-movements of 21 participants with autism and 23 age-, sex- and IQ-matched typically developing participants performing three facial analysis tasks: free-viewing, emotion recognition, and brow-mouth width comparison. In the emotion recognition task, fixations of participants with autism were positioned on lower areas of the faces and were less focused on the eyes compared to the typically developing group. Additionally, the utility of information extracted by them in the emotion recognition task was lower. Thus, the emotion recognition deficit typical in autism can be at least partly traced to the earliest stage of face processing, i.e. to the extraction of visual information via eye-fixations.

A Novel Eye Movement Data Transformation Technique that Preserves Temporal Information: A Demonstration in a Face Processing Task.

Existing research has shown that human eye-movement data conveys rich information about underlying mental processes, and that the latter may be inferred from the former. However, most related studies rely on spatial information about which different areas of visual stimuli were looked at, without considering the order in which this occurred. Although powerful algorithms for making pairwise comparisons between eye-movement sequences (scanpaths) exist, the problem is how to compare two groups of scanpaths, e.g., those registered with vs. without an experimental manipulation in place, rather than individual scanpaths. Here, we propose that the problem might be solved by projecting a scanpath similarity matrix, obtained via a pairwise comparison algorithm, to a lower-dimensional space (the comparison and dimensionality-reduction techniques we use are ScanMatch and t-SNE). The resulting distributions of low-dimensional vectors representing individual scanpaths can be statistically compared. To assess if the differences result from temporal scanpath features, we propose to statistically compare the cross-validated accuracies of two classifiers predicting group membership: (1) based exclusively on spatial metrics; (2) based additionally on the obtained scanpath representation vectors. To illustrate, we compare autistic vs. typically-developing individuals looking at human faces during a lab experiment and find significant differences in temporal scanpath features.

A valence asymmetry in predecisional distortion of information: Evidence from an eye tracking study with incentivized choices.

Existing research shows that the order in which evidence arrives can bias its evaluation and the resulting decision in favor of information encountered early on. We used eye-tracking to study the underlying cognitive mechanisms in the context of incentivized financial choices based on real world market data. Subjects learned about the presence/absence of a transaction fee, before seeing expert opinions regarding an investment prospect and deciding whether to invest. Although the fee had no effect on the processing of negative opinions, we found that positive ones were processed more effortlessly (with lower gaze duration and pupil dilation) when it was absent, that is, when they were congruent with the positive initial information in the shape of the lack of fees. Despite their more effortless processing in the absence of fees, positive opinions then had a greater impact on the subjects' beliefs. In addition to an initial study with 100 subjects, these findings were replicated in a second, preregistered experiment with 103 subjects, in which a positive premium was paid in the event of no fee. Thus, we argue that the valence asymmetry in favor of positive information observed in evaluative priming, person perception, and related tasks (the density hypothesis) also plays a crucial role in incentivized economic choice. In fact, rather than being a detrimental bias, the overweighting of initial evidence often observed in decisions could be seen as an adaptive heuristic aimed at reducing the cost of processing later, similar information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Auditory noise increases the allocation of attention to the mouth, and the eyes pay the price: An eye-tracking study.

We investigated the effect of auditory noise added to speech on patterns of looking at faces in 40 toddlers. We hypothesised that noise would increase the difficulty of processing speech, making children allocate more attention to the mouth of the speaker to gain visual speech cues from mouth movements. We also hypothesised that this shift would cause a decrease in fixation time to the eyes, potentially decreasing the ability to monitor gaze. We found that adding noise increased the number of fixations to the mouth area, at the price of a decreased number of fixations to the eyes. Thus, to our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating a mouth-eyes trade-off between attention allocated to social cues coming from the eyes and linguistic cues coming from the mouth. We also found that children with higher word recognition proficiency and higher average pupil response had an increased likelihood of fixating the mouth, compared to the eyes and the rest of the screen, indicating stronger motivation to decode the speech.

"Economies of Experience"-Disambiguation of Degraded Stimuli Leads to a Decreased Dispersion of Eye-Movement Patterns.

We demonstrate "economies of experience" in eye-movement patterns-that is, optimization of eye-movement patterns aimed at more efficient and less costly visual processing, similar to the priming-induced formation of sparser cortical representations or reduced reaction times. Participants looked at Mooney-type, degraded stimuli that were difficult to recognize without prior experience, but easily recognizable after exposure to their undegraded versions. As predicted, eye-movement dispersion, velocity, and the number of fixations decreased with each stimulus presentation. Further analyses showed that this effect was contingent on recognition, and the selection of information from the stimulus could be informed by the identity of the presented object. Finally, our study demonstrates that after exposure to the undegraded version of the stimulus, eye-movement patterns associated with its degraded and undegraded versions become more similar. This suggests that eye-movement patterns can evolve to facilitate the optimal processing of a given stimulus via experience-driven perceptual learning.

The trickle-down effect of predictability: Secondary task performance benefits from predictability in the primary task.

Predictions optimize processing by reducing attentional resources allocation to expected or predictable sensory data. Our study demonstrates that these saved processing resources can be then used on concurrent stimuli, and in consequence improve their processing and encoding. We illustrate this "trickle-down" effect with a dual task, where the primary task varied in terms of predictability. The primary task involved detection of a pre-specified symbol that appeared at some point of a short video of a dot moving along a random, semi-predictable or predictable trajectory. The concurrent secondary task involved memorization of photographs representing either emotionally neutral or non-neutral (social or threatening) content. Performance in the secondary task was measured by a memory test. We found that participants allocated more attention to unpredictable (random and semi-predictable) stimuli than to predictable stimuli. Additionally, when the stimuli in the primary task were more predictable, participants performed better in the secondary task, as evidenced by higher sensitivity in the memory test. Finally, social or threatening stimuli were allocated more "looking time" and a larger number of saccades than neutral stimuli. This effect was stronger for the threatening stimuli than social stimuli. Thus, predictability of environmental input is used in optimizing the allocation of attentional resources, which trickles-down and benefits the processing of concurrent stimuli.

When believing is seeing: the role of predictions in shaping visual perception.

The study investigated the influence of predictions on perception-in particular, how strong but erroneous prediction coupled with poor sensory data can trigger misperceptions. Using signal detection, we tested whether predictions induced by a semantic cue change the recognition threshold (criterion) or the subjectively perceived differences between stimuli (sensitivity). In a series of 3 experiments, participants observed pictures of (a) real objects distorted to various extents (targets), (b) noise with elements corresponding to meaningful objects (foils), or (c) nonsense images (noise). Stimuli were preceded either by a semantic cue or by a blank screen with equal probability. Presence of the cue resulted in a more liberal criterion, but only for targets and foils. The cue decreased sensitivity between the distorted targets, but increased sensitivity between the targets and noise-that is, the cue increased between-class differences, but decreased within-class differences. When there was no correspondence between prediction and the sensory input, prediction actually increased the chances of correctly rejecting noise. The influence of the cue was strongest for the moderately distorted targets and foils-when uncertainty related to the bottom-up input was the highest.