Objectives: The current study aimed to directly compare attention to social and non-social information in naturalistic scenes within and between adults with and without ASD. It further investigated whether the content of the scene and the nature of the competing non-social information moderated the reduced attention to socially relevant information (i.e. people) seen in individuals with ASD.
Design: An experimental within participant design in combination with eye tracking technology was employed to investigate gaze duration to social and non-social parts of naturalistic scenes. Social and non-social areas of scenes differed in their perceived priority and scenes overall differed in their “busyness” and whether they were presented with no, low or high intelligibility background noise.
Methods: The sample consisted of 24 high-functioning adults with ASD and 26 mean age and IQ matched TD adults. Their gaze duration data was analysed using linear mixed-effect (multilevel) modelling.
Results: Participants with ASD viewed social and perceived priority areas of the scenes less than TD adults. However, scene “busyness” affected adults with and without ASD similarly by reducing their attention to the scene overall, to the priority information, and to the social information, in particular.
Conclusions: The findings suggest that the reduced social attention in ASD occurs due to the lack of social bias, seen in TD adults, rather than to non-social bias. Findings that adults with ASD pay less attention to the information prioritised by TD adults are discussed in terms of ‘gestalt’ notions of perception.