Autistic Traits and Cognitive Biases for Emotional Faces in Neurotypicals
Abstract
Cognitive biases can involve the tendency to extract some sensory inputs while ignoring others. Cognitive biases impact perception, and subsequent processing decisions made on the basis of perception. Cognitive biases can disrupt accurate and efficient processing of social information, and may underlie core features of social communication difficulties. How cognitive biases contribute to atypical social processing associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) traits is unknown. We examined whether cognitive biases for emotional faces were related to scores from the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ), and whether our measures of cognitive biases from a dot- probe paradigm with concurrent eye tracking were comparable. We did not find sufficient evidence to relate ASD traits and cognitive biases. We found limited eye movements made during the paradigm and no relationship between the two concurrent measures. We highlight outstanding questions in the investigation of ASD traits and cognitive biases through the dot- probe paradigm and eye tracking.