Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has found an association between reduced eye movement consistency in face recognition and autistic traits in social skills in autistic individuals, which may be related to their less well-developed visual routines for social stimuli resulting from lack of social interest. Here we showed that this association was not observed in neurotypical adults, which may be related to their well-learned visual routines that have converged to a similar consistency level, obscuring the potential association. In contrast, neurotypicals' eye movement consistency in subordinate-level object recognition was associated with autistic traits in Social Skills, and their subordinate-level object recognition performance was associated with autistic traits in Patterns/Details. These results suggested a link between autistic traits and subordinate-level object processing, consistent with a domain-general view of autism where atypical visual processing may underlie the social cognitive differences in autism. Our findings thus have important implications for early screening and intervention for autism.