scholarly journals Eye contact takes two – autistic and social anxiety traits predict gaze behavior in dyadic interaction

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. jep.062917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy S. Hessels ◽  
Gijs A. Holleman ◽  
Tim H. W. Cornelissen ◽  
Ignace T. C. Hooge ◽  
Chantal Kemner
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Dyadic Interaction ◽  
Gaze Behavior ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Gaze Aversion ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
Typical Experiment ◽  
The Face

Research on social impairments in psychopathology has relied heavily on the face processing literature. However, although many sub-systems of facial information processing are described, recent evidence suggests that generalizability of these findings to social settings may be limited. The main argument is that in social interaction, the content of faces is more dynamic and dependent on the interplay between interaction partners, than the content of a non-responsive face (e.g. pictures or videos) as portrayed in a typical experiment. The question beckons whether gaze atypicalities to non-responsive faces in certain disorders generalize to faces in interaction. In the present study, a dual eye-tracking setup capable of recording gaze with high resolution was used to investigate how gaze behavior in interaction is related to traits of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). As clinical ASD and SAD groups have exhibited deficiencies in reciprocal social behavior, traits of these two conditions were assessed in a general population. We report that gaze behavior in interaction of individuals scoring high on ASD and SAD traits corroborates hypotheses posed in typical face-processing research using non-responsive stimuli. Moreover, our findings on the relation between paired gaze states (when and how often pairs look at each other’s eyes simultaneously or alternately) and ASD and SAD traits bear resemblance to prevailing models in the ASD literature (the ‘gaze aversion’ model) and SAD literature (the ‘vigilant-avoidance’ model). Pair-based analyses of gaze may reveal behavioral patterns crucial to our understanding of ASD and SAD, and more general to our understanding of eye movements as social signals in interaction.

scholarly journals Face processing and exploration of social signals in Prader-Willi syndrome: a genetic signature

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimmy Debladis ◽  
Marion Valette ◽  
Kuzma Strenilkov ◽  
Carine Mantoulan ◽  
Denise Thuilleaux ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Emotion Recognition ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Genetic Disorder ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Prader Willi Syndrome ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
The Face

Abstract Background Faces are critical social cues that must be perfectly processed in order to engage appropriately in everyday social interactions. In Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS), a rare genetic disorder characterized by cognitive and behavioural difficulties including autism spectrum disorder, the literature referring to face processing is sparse. Given reports of poor social interactions in individuals with PWS, we sought to assess their face and emotion recognition skills during eyetracking recordings. Results Compared with controls, patients with PWS performed more poorly on face/emotion recognition. We observed atypical facial exploration by patients with maternal disomy. These patients looked preferentially at the mouth region, whereas patients with a deletion and controls were more attracted to the eye region. During social scenes, the exploration became more atypical as the social content increased. Conclusions Our comprehensive study brings new insights into the face processing of patients with PWS. Atypical facial exploration was only displayed by patients with the maternal disomy subtype, corresponding to their higher rate of autism spectrum disorder. This finding strongly argues in favor of early identification of this genetic subgroup in order to optimize care by implementing tailored interventions for each patient as soon as possible.

scholarly journals Gaze to faces across interactive contexts in infants at heightened risk for autism

Autism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 763-768 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devon N Gangi ◽  
AJ Schwichtenberg ◽  
Ana-Maria Iosif ◽  
Gregory S Young ◽  
Fam Baguio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Social Partner ◽  
Infant Behavior ◽  
Gaze Behavior ◽  
Communicative Behavior ◽  
The Face ◽  
High Risk Infants ◽  
Social Communicative

Infant social-communicative behavior, such as gaze to the face of an interactive partner, is an important early developmental skill. Children with autism spectrum disorder exhibit atypicalities in social-communicative behavior, including gaze and eye contact. Behavioral differences in infancy may serve as early markers of autism spectrum disorder and help identify individuals at highest risk for developing the disorder. Researchers often assess social-communicative behavior in a single interactive context, such as during assessment with an unfamiliar examiner or play with a parent. Understanding whether infant behavior is consistent across such contexts is important for evaluating the validity of experimental paradigms and the generalizability of findings from one interactive context/partner to another. We examined infant gaze to the face of a social partner at 6, 9, and 12 months of age in infants who were later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, as well as low- and high-risk infants without autism spectrum disorder outcomes, across two interactive contexts: structured testing with an unfamiliar examiner and semi-structured play with a parent. By 9 months, infant gaze behavior was significantly associated between the two contexts. By 12 months, infants without autism spectrum disorder outcomes exhibited higher mean rates of gaze to faces during parent–child play than Mullen testing, while the gaze behavior of the autism spectrum disorder group did not differ by context—suggesting that infants developing autism spectrum disorder may be less sensitive to context or interactive partner. Findings support the validity of assessing infant social-communicative behavior during structured laboratory settings and suggest that infant behavior exhibits consistency across settings and interactive partners.

scholarly journals Detection of eye contact with deep neural networks is as accurate as human experts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunji Chong ◽  
Elysha Clark-Whitney ◽  
Audrey Southerland ◽  
Elizabeth Stubbs ◽  
Chanel Miller ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Eye Contact ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Gaze Behavior ◽  
Equivalence Tests ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
Automated Coding ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
And Performance

Eye contact is among the most primary means of social communication that humans use from the first months of life. Quantification of eye contact is valuable in various scenarios as a part of the analysis of social roles, communication skills, and medical screening. Estimating a subject's looking direction from video is a challenging task, but eye contact can be effectively captured by a wearable point-of-view camera which provides a unique viewpoint as a result of its configuration. While moments of eye contact from this viewpoint can be hand coded, such process tends to be laborious and subjective. In this work, we developed the first deep neural network model to automatically detect eye contact in egocentric video with accuracy equivalent to that of human experts. We trained a deep convolutional neural network using a dataset of 4,339,879 annotated images, consisting of 103 subjects with diverse demographic backgrounds. 57 have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. The network achieves overall precision 0.936 and recall 0.943 on 18 set-aside validation subjects, and performance is on par with 10 trained human coders with a mean precision 0.918 and recall 0.946. This result passes class equivalence tests in Cohen’s kappa scores (equivalence boundary of 0.025, p < .005), demonstrating that deep learning model can produce automated coding with a level of reliability comparable to human coders. The presented method will be instrumental in analyzing gaze behavior in naturalistic social settings by serving as a scalable, objective, and accessible tool for clinicians and researchers.

scholarly journals Social cognition in individuals born preterm

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina A. Pavlova ◽  
Jessica Galli ◽  
Federica Zanetti ◽  
Federica Pagani ◽  
Serena Micheletti ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Preterm Birth ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Periventricular Leukomalacia ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
The Face

AbstractFaces hold a substantial value for effective social interactions and sharing. Covering faces with masks, due to COVID-19 regulations, may lead to difficulties in using social signals, in particular, in individuals with neurodevelopmental conditions. Daily-life social participation of individuals who were born preterm is of immense importance for their quality of life. Here we examined face tuning in individuals (aged 12.79 ± 1.89 years) who were born preterm and exhibited signs of periventricular leukomalacia (PVL), a dominant form of brain injury in preterm birth survivors. For assessing the face sensitivity in this population, we implemented a recently developed experimental tool, a set of Face-n-Food images bordering on the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The key benefit of these images is that single components do not trigger face processing. Although a coarse face schema is thought to be hardwired in the brain, former preterms exhibit substantial shortages in the face tuning not only compared with typically developing controls but also with individuals with autistic spectrum disorders. The lack of correlations between the face sensitivity and other cognitive abilities indicates that these deficits are domain-specific. This underscores impact of preterm birth sequelae for social functioning at large. Comparison of the findings with data in individuals with other neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions provides novel insights into the origins of deficient face processing.

scholarly journals Initial eye gaze to faces and its functional consequence on face identification abilities in autism spectrum disorder

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly B. Schauder ◽  
Woon Ju Park ◽  
Yuliy Tsank ◽  
Miguel P. Eckstein ◽  
Duje Tadin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Eye Movement ◽  
Face Perception ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Face Identification ◽  
Identification Performance ◽  
Functional Consequence ◽  
The Face

Abstract Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder defined and diagnosed by core deficits in social communication and the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviors. Research on face processing suggests deficits in this domain in ASD but includes many mixed findings regarding the nature and extent of these differences. The first eye movement to a face has been shown to be highly informative and sufficient to achieve high performance in face identification in neurotypical adults. The current study focused on this critical moment shown to be essential in the process of face identification. Methods We applied an established eye-tracking and face identification paradigm to comprehensively characterize the initial eye movement to a face and test its functional consequence on face identification performance in adolescents with and without ASD (n = 21 per group), and in neurotypical adults. Specifically, we presented a series of faces and measured the landing location of the first saccade to each face, while simultaneously measuring their face identification abilities. Then, individuals were guided to look at specific locations on the face, and we measured how face identification performance varied as a function of that location. Adolescent participants also completed a more traditional measure of face identification which allowed us to more fully characterize face identification abilities in ASD. Results Our results indicate that the location of the initial look to faces and face identification performance for briefly presented faces are intact in ASD, ruling out the possibility that deficits in face perception, at least in adolescents with ASD, begin with the initial eye movement to the face. However, individuals with ASD showed impairments on the more traditional measure of face identification. Conclusion Together, the observed dissociation between initial, rapid face perception processes, and other measures of face perception offers new insights and hypotheses related to the timing and perceptual complexity of face processing and how these specific aspects of face identification may be disrupted in ASD.

Face Inversion Effect Emerges Under Critical Configural Discrepancy

2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jisien Yang ◽  
Adrian Schwaninger
Keyword(s):  
Face Recognition ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Underlying Mechanism ◽  
Inversion Effect ◽  
Configural Processing ◽  
Major Contributor ◽  
Face Inversion Effect ◽  
Configural Information ◽  
Face Inversion ◽  
The Face

Configural processing has been considered the major contributor to the face inversion effect (FIE) in face recognition. However, most researchers have only obtained the FIE with one specific ratio of configural alteration. It remains unclear whether the ratio of configural alteration itself can mediate the occurrence of the FIE. We aimed to clarify this issue by manipulating the configural information parametrically using six different ratios, ranging from 4% to 24%. Participants were asked to judge whether a pair of faces were entirely identical or different. The paired faces that were to be compared were presented either simultaneously (Experiment 1) or sequentially (Experiment 2). Both experiments revealed that the FIE was observed only when the ratio of configural alteration was in the intermediate range. These results indicate that even though the FIE has been frequently adopted as an index to examine the underlying mechanism of face processing, the emergence of the FIE is not robust with any configural alteration but dependent on the ratio of configural alteration.

Unravelling the phenotypic tangle of autistic, schizotypal and social anxiety traits: A Network Analysis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orestis Zavlis ◽  
Myles Jones
Keyword(s):  
Network Analysis ◽  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Factor Structure ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Schizotypal Personality ◽  
The Social ◽  
Trait Level ◽  
General Adult Population

Substantial overlap exists between schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders, with part of that overlap hypothesised to be due to comorbid social anxiety. The current paper investigates the interactions and factor structure of these disorders at a personality trait level, through the lens of a network model. The items of the Autism Quotient (AQ), Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire Brief-Revised (SPQ-BR), and the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (L-SAS) were combined and completed by 345 members of the general adult population. An Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) on the AQ-SPQ-BR combined inventory revealed two communities (factors), which reflected the general autism and schizotypal phenotypes. An additional EGA on all inventories validated the AQ-SPQ-BR factor structure and revealed another community, Social Anxiety (L-SAS). A Network Analysis (NA) on all inventories revealed several moderately central subscales, which collectively reflected the social-interpersonal impairments of the three disorders. The current results suggest that a combination of recent network- and traditional factor-analytic techniques may present a fruitful approach to understanding the underlying structure as well as relation of different psychopathologies.

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