The visual array task: A novel gaze-based measure of object label and category knowledge.

Visual attention measures of receptive vocabulary place minimal task demand on participants and produce a more accurate measure of language comprehension than parent report measures. However, current gaze-based measures employ visual comparisons limited to two simultaneous items. With this limitation, the degree of similarity of the target to the distractor can have a significant impact on the interpretation of task performance. The current study evaluates a novel gaze-based paradigm that includes an eight-item array. This visual array task (VAT) combines the theoretical frameworks of the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPLP) and looking-while-listening (LWL) methods of language comprehension measurement but using a larger array of simultaneously presented items. The use of a larger array of items and the inclusion of a superordinate category contrast may provide a more sensitive measure of receptive vocabulary as well as an understanding of the extent to which early word comprehension reflects knowledge of broader categories. Results indicated that the tested VAT was a sensitive measure of both object label and category knowledge. This paradigm provides researchers with a flexible and efficient task to measure language comprehension and category knowledge while reducing behavioral demands placed on participants.

Social and Nonsocial Reward Anticipation in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorders: Current Status and Future Directions.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: While there has been sustained interest in understanding the role of reward processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), researchers are just beginning to focus on the anticipation phase of reward processing in this population. This review aimed to briefly summarize recent advancements in functional imaging studies of anticipatory social and nonsocial reward processing in individuals with and without ASD and provide suggestions for avenues of future research. RECENT FINDINGS: Reward salience and activation of the complex network of brain regions supporting reward anticipation vary across development and by important demographic characteristics, such as sex assigned at birth. Current research comparing social and nonsocial reward anticipation may possess confounds related to the mismatch in tangibility and salience of social and nonsocial experimental stimuli. Growing evidence suggests individuals with ASD demonstrate aberrant generalized reward anticipation that is not specific to social reward. Future research should carefully match social and nonsocial reward stimuli and consider employing a longitudinal design to disentangle the complex processes contributing to the development of reward anticipation. It may be useful to conceptualize differences in reward anticipation as a transdiagnostic factor, rather than an ASD-specific deficit.

Vocal Emotion Recognition in Autism: Behavioral Performance and Event-Related Potential (ERP) Response.

Autistic youth display difficulties in emotion recognition, yet little research has examined behavioral and neural indices of vocal emotion recognition (VER). The current study examines behavioral and event-related potential (N100, P200, Late Positive Potential [LPP]) indices of VER in autistic and non-autistic youth. Participants (N = 164) completed an emotion recognition task, the Diagnostic Analyses of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA-2) which included VER, during EEG recording. The LPP amplitude was larger in response to high intensity VER, and social cognition predicted VER errors. Verbal IQ, not autism, was related to VER errors. An interaction between VER intensity and social communication impairments revealed these impairments were related to larger LPP amplitudes during low intensity VER. Taken together, differences in VER may be due to higher order cognitive processes, not basic, early perception (N100, P200), and verbal cognitive abilities may underlie behavioral, yet occlude neural, differences in VER processing.

Object label and category knowledge among toddlers at risk for autism spectrum disorder: An application of the visual array task.

Individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate atypical development of receptive language and object category knowledge. Yet, little is known about the emerging relation between these two competencies in this population. The present study utilized a gaze-based paradigm, the visual array task (VAT), to examine the relation between object label and object category knowledge in a sample of toddlers at heightened genetic risk for developing ASD. Eighty-eight toddlers with at least one typically developing older sibling (low-risk; LR) or one older sibling diagnosed with ASD (high-risk; HR) completed the VAT at 17 (LR n = 20; HR n = 27) and/or 25 months of age (LR n = 42; HR n = 22). Results indicated that the VAT was both a sensitive measure of receptive vocabulary as well as capable of reflecting gains in category knowledge for toddlers at genetic risk of developing ASD. Notably, an early emerging difference in the relation between target label knowledge and category knowledge for the groups was observed at 17 months of age but dissipated by 25 months of age. This suggests that while the link between receptive vocabulary and category knowledge may develop earlier in LR groups, HR groups may potentially catch up by the second year of life. Therefore, it is likely meaningful to consider differences in category knowledge when conceptualizing the receptive language deficits associated with HR populations. During language learning, typically developing children are sensitive to the common features of category members and use this information to generalize known object labels to newly encountered exemplars. The inability to identify similarities between category members and/or utilize this information when learning new object referents at 17 months of age may be a potential mechanism underlying the delays observed in HR populations.

An Electrocortical Measure Associated with Metarepresentation Mediates the Relationship between Autism Symptoms and Theory of Mind.

Impairments in theory of mind (ToM) - long considered common among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) - are in fact highly heterogeneous across this population. While such heterogeneity should be reflected in differential recruitment of neural mechanisms during ToM reasoning, no research has yet uncovered a mechanism that explains these individual differences. In this study, 78 (48 ASD) adolescents viewed ToM vignettes and made mental state inferences about characters' behavior while participant electrophysiology was concurrently recorded. Two candidate event-related potentials (ERPs) - the Late Positive Complex (LPC) and the Late Slow Wave (LSW) - were successfully elicited. LPC scores correlated positively with ToM accuracy and negatively with ASD symptom severity. Notably, the LPC partially mediated the relationship between ASD symptoms and ToM accuracy, suggesting this ERP component, thought to represent cognitive metarepresentation, may help explain differences in ToM performance in some individuals with ASD.

Facial Emotions Are Accurately Encoded in the Neural Signal of Those With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Deep Learning Approach.

BACKGROUND: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit frequent behavioral deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER). It remains unknown whether these deficits arise because facial emotion information is not encoded in their neural signal or because it is encodes but fails to translate to FER behavior (deployment). This distinction has functional implications, including constraining when differences in social information processing occur in ASD, and guiding interventions (i.e., developing prosthetic FER vs. reinforcing existing skills). METHODS: We utilized a discriminative and contemporary machine learning approach-deep convolutional neural networks-to classify facial emotions viewed by individuals with and without ASD (N = 88) from concurrently recorded electroencephalography signals. RESULTS: The convolutional neural network classified facial emotions with high accuracy for both ASD and non-ASD groups, even though individuals with ASD performed more poorly on the concurrent FER task. In fact, convolutional neural network accuracy was greater in the ASD group and was not related to behavioral performance. This pattern of results replicated across three independent participant samples. Moreover, feature importance analyses suggested that a late temporal window of neural activity (1000-1500 ms) may be uniquely important in facial emotion classification for individuals with ASD. CONCLUSIONS: Our results reveal for the first time that facial emotion information is encoded in the neural signal of individuals with (and without) ASD. Thus, observed difficulties in behavioral FER associated with ASD likely arise from difficulties in decoding or deployment of facial emotion information within the neural signal. Interventions should focus on capitalizing on this intact encoding rather than promoting compensation or FER prostheses.

Evidence of an Own-Age Bias in Facial Emotion Recognition for Adolescents With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

A common interpretation of the face-processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that they arise from a failure to develop normative levels of perceptual expertise. One indicator of perceptual expertise for faces is the own-age bias, operationalized as a processing advantage for faces of one's own age, presumably due to more frequent contact and experience. This effect is especially evident in domains of face recognition memory but less commonly investigated in social-emotional expertise (e.g., facial emotion recognition; FER), where individuals with ASD have shown consistent deficits. In the present study, we investigated whether a FER task would elicit an own-age bias for individuals with and without ASD and explored how the magnitude of an own-age bias may differ as a function of ASD status and symptoms. Ninety-two adolescents (63 male) between the ages of 11 and 14 years completed the child- and adult-face subtests of a standardized FER task. Overall FER accuracy was found to differ by ASD severity, reflecting poorer performance for those with increased symptoms. Results also indicated that an own-age bias was evident, reflecting greater FER performance for child compared to adult faces, for all adolescents regardless of ASD status or symptoms. However, the strength of the observed own-age bias did not differ by ASD status or severity. Findings suggest that face processing abilities of adolescents with ASD may be influenced by experience with specific categories of stimuli, similar to their typically developing peers.

Differences in the Late Positive Potential and P300 to Emotional Faces in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Despite evidence suggesting differences in early event-related potential (ERP) responses to social emotional stimuli, little is known about later stage ERP contributions to social emotional processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Adults with and without ASD completed a facial emotion recognition task involving stimuli that varied by emotional intensity while electroencephalograms were recorded. Principal components analysis was used to examine P300 and late positive potential (LPP) modulation by emotional intensity. Results indicated that greater ASD symptomatology evinced heightened P300 to high relative to low intensity faces, then heightened LPP to low relative to high intensity faces. Findings suggest that adults with greater ASD symptomatology may demonstrate a lag in engagement in elaborative processing of low intensity faces.

Social performance-based interventions promote gains in social knowledge in the absence of explicit training for youth with autism spectrum disorder.

Youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience deficits in social knowledge. It has long been theorized that these youth must learn these skills explicitly, and social skills interventions (SSIs) have followed suit. Recently, performance-based SSIs have emerged, which promote in vivo opportunities for social engagement without explicit instruction. Effects of performance-based SSIs on social knowledge have not been examined. This study employs two discrete samples (one lab-based, one community-based) of youth with ASD to examine the effects of performance-based interventions on social knowledge. Results largely support the efficacy and effectiveness of improving social knowledge by performance-based interventions without explicit teaching. This indicates that youth with ASD may be able to learn these aspects of social cognition implicitly, rather than exclusively explicitly. The results of the current study also suggest that SSI content, dosage, and intensity may relate to these outcomes, which are important considerations in clinical practice and future studies.