Clinically relevant autistic traits predict greater reliance on detail for image recognition

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 10; no. 1; p. 14239
• Main Authors: Alink, Arjen, Charest, Ian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 28.08.2020; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 631/378/1689/1373; 631/378/2613/2616; 631/378/2649; 631/378/2649/1723; Adolescent; Attention - physiology; Autism; Autism Spectrum Disorder - psychology; Autistic Disorder - psychology; Cognition - physiology; Female; Frequency dependence; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Information processing; Male; multidisciplinary; Pattern recognition; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Recognition, Psychology; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Vision, Ocular - physiology; Visual Perception - physiology; Young Adult
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-70953-8

Individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis are often described as having an eye for detail. But it remains to be shown that a detail-focused processing bias is a ubiquitous property of vision in individuals with ASD. To address this question, we investigated whether a greater number of autistic traits in neurotypical subjects is associated with an increased reliance on image details during a natural image recognition task. To this end, we use a novel reverse correlation-based method (feature diagnosticity mapping) for measuring the relative importance of low-level image features for object recognition. The main finding of this study is that image recognition in participants with an above-median number of autistic traits benefited more from the presence of high-spatial frequency image features. Furthermore, we found that this reliance-on-detail effect was best predicted by the presence of the most clinically relevant autistic traits. Therefore, our findings suggest that a greater number of autistic traits in neurotypical individuals is associated with a more detail-oriented visual information processing strategy and that this effect might generalize to a clinical ASD population.