Abstract
Previous studies have shown that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties recognizing social signals such as human faces. Neuroscience and visual science studies have examined visual attention using the Navon task and visual search task (e.g., Navon, 1977; Riby et al., 2012). These studies have shown that people with ASD are less aware of global features but superior to process local features than people with typical development (TD). However, visual attention to global and local features in the face has not been fully explored in people with ASD. We thus aim to determine whether detecting local features depends on autistic traits when paying attention to a face-like configuration. We created a new visual stimulus by focusing on the “henohenomoheji,” a traditional Japanese face picture. The four Japanese alphabets are spatially arranged to create face-like and non-face-like stimuli. Thirty-seven university students participated in this study, and their autistic traits were assessed with the autism-spectrum quotient Japanese version. The target letter was presented before (pre-target condition) or after (post-target condition) the stimuli with 100-ms stimulus onset asynchrony. The participants judged the presence or absence of a target letter in all trials and a face-likeness in several trials. As a result, we found a significant negative correlation between the degree of autistic trait and target detection accuracy in the post-target with face-like stimuli condition (r = -.336, p < .05). Namely, the higher the autistic trait, the less correctly identified the target in the condition. There was no significant correlation between the accuracy and autistic traits in the other conditions (r = -.211~ .102, p = .211~ .547). The results suggest that people with ASD are less likely to pay attention to local features than TDs when they need attention to face-like features in a complex pattern of faces and letters.