Neural and visual processing of social gaze cueing in typical and ASD adults

Atypical eye gaze in joint attention is a clinical characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Despite this documented symptom, neural processing of joint attention tasks in real-life social interactions is not understood. To address this knowledge gap, functional-near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and eye-tracking data were acquired simultaneously as ASD and typically developed (TD) individuals engaged in a gaze-directed joint attention task with a live human and robot partner. We test the hypothesis that face processing deficits in ASD are greater for interactive faces than for simulated (robot) faces. Consistent with prior findings, neural responses during human gaze cueing modulated by face visual dwell time resulted in increased activity of ventral frontal regions in ASD and dorsal parietal systems in TD participants. Hypoactivity of the right dorsal parietal area during live human gaze cueing was correlated with autism spectrum symptom severity: Brief Observations of Symptom..., Participants. Twenty ASD adults (Mean age 27±5.9 years; 18 right-handed, 2 left-handed (Oldfield, 1971) and 30 typically-developed (TD) adults (Mean age 23±4.4 years; 27 right-handed and 3 left) participated in this study (Table 1).  ASD diagnoses were confirmed by gold standard, research-reliable clinician assessments, including the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd Edition (ADOS-2 (Lord et al., 2012)), Brief Observation of Symptoms of Autism (BOSA (Lord et al., 2020)), and expert clinical judgment using DSM-5 criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Average ADOS-2 and BOSA Comparison Scores were 7 + 0.26 and 7 + 0.42, respectively. ​​Assessment and diagnostic tests were performed in clinical facilities at the Yale Child Study Center and the Brain Function Laboratory. Participants were age-matched (Table 1) and recruited from ongoing research in the McPartland Lab, the Yale Developmental Disabilities Clinic, and the broader community through flyers and social media ..., All data files have been exported into .csv files.