Exploring the differences in social and non-social cue responses in relation to autism spectrum quotient scores in the general population

Abstract

There are a number of events taking place in our surrounding environment every minute of our lives, all sending different types of information. The individual’s immediate experience of these events and his awareness gives rise to the process of attention. Humans have evolved an adaptive mechanism to encode useful information through eye gaze as well as the ability to shift their attention towards the direction another individual is looking at. However, this process of attention shifting might cause some issues for individuals with attention disorders due to their lack of social skills leading to less eye contact (Conway, Jones, DeBruine & Little, 2007; McCallum, 2015; Lawson, Aylward, Roiser & Rees, 2017). This has motivated the current research study. Firstly, it looked at the difference in reaction times between social (human avatar) and non-social (arrows) cues through two different computer-based tasks. Secondly, it looked at the autism spectrum traits of the general population and compared their response times to their social cueing performance. Results showed an interaction between cue types and validity for the first task but only a main effect of validity for the second task. No correlation was found between the participants’ autism quotient scores and their social cue scores. Despite the limitations, the current study helped to further explore the shift of attention to social and non-social cues in both valid and in valid trials. Also it encourages further research to explore spatial cueing in relation to different levels of autism spectrum traits in the general population.