Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has found that autistic individuals have poorer performance and lower eye movement consistency in face recognition, which may be related to less face processing experience due to lack of social interests. Here we showed that this phenomenon was not observed in visual search tasks, as autistic individuals and matched neurotypicals had similar hit rate and precision as well as eye movement behavior when searching for either social (human) or non-social (vehicle) stimuli. However, autistic individuals had longer search time and made more and longer fixations, suggesting difficulties in identifying potential targets. This difficulty was not limited to social stimuli, supporting a domain-general view of deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Our findings have important implications for understanding the core mechanisms underlying social-cognitive impairment in ASD.