Atypical and Non-spontaneous Attentional Control in “just Look” Tasks for Face Recognition in ASD Children Revealed by Gaze Tracking Pupillometry
Abstract We hypothesized that abnormalities in social interaction and executive function may be related to fluctuations in pupil diameter, which reflect norepinephrine activity in terms of attentional function. We adopted “just look” tasks to examine spontaneous changes in attention. Twenty children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 39 typically developing (TD) controls participated. Intragroup comparisons of differences in pupil diameter changes during a shift from a scrambled image to the original image (task 1-a), fixation on faces, letters, and geometric patterns (task 1-b), and pupil diameter changes during a shift from a nonsense image to a face-like image (task 2) were performed. In task 1-a, ASD children had prolonged pupil dilation after the shift in images, whereas the pupil contracted in TD children, indicating deficits in attentional disengagement in ASD children. In task 1-b, ASD children preferred geometric patterns over faces. In task 2, the rate of pupillary dilatation during the shift in images was lower in ASD children than in TD children. Therefore, ASD children appear to have abnormalities in spontaneous attention to faces, which function automatically in TD children. In conclusion, atypical attentional function may contribute to the manifestation of abnormalities in social interaction and executive control in ASD.