Brief Report: Preferred Processing of Social Stimuli in Autism: A Perception Task.
A Meermeier, M Jording, Y Alayoubi and 3 others
PMID 34532839WHAT IT FOUND
Both adults with autism and adults without autism recognized people images faster than animal or object images.
Adults with autism were slower overall, but not specifically worse with people images.
Key findings
01Across both groups, social images were recognized 0.423 seconds faster than non-social images.
02Adults with autism took 0.382 seconds longer than controls to recognize emerging images, regardless of whether the image was social or non-social.
03In the persistence task, social images remained recognizable about 0.089 seconds longer than non-social images, and autism did not change this effect.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study used a small sample: 23 adults with autism and 26 controls, and the authors say the sample was limited by how many people with autism were willing and eligible. All adults with autism were fully verbal and highly functioning, and participants with learning disability, intellectual impairment or clinically relevant depression were excluded, so results may not apply to broader autism populations. The paper states the two diagnostic groups differed significantly in age by about 5 years, although separate analyses did not point towards significant influences of age or gender on the tasks. The main results are response times in a laboratory image task, not communication, social interaction, or treatment outcomes. The complexity finding was exploratory, and separate post-hoc tests did not show significant group-by-image interactions.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adults with autism have a specific difficulty recognizing social scenes. The autism group was slower to recognize both social and non-social images, and the group-by-image interaction was not significant. The study tested a laboratory perception task, not a treatment.