Perception and central coherence in autism: A family genetic eye-tracking study

 描述(由申请人提供)：自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)是一种神经遗传性疾病，其特征是社交沟通障碍以及受限和重复的兴趣和行为。知觉一致性的差异，包括以牺牲全局加工为代价的局部知觉偏差，以及与受限兴趣相关的持久化视觉注意，被认为是ASD的关键特征。局部和全球(即选择性注意 对于局部和整体，分别)处理能力取决于不同的潜在神经关联，这可能对应于ASD的症状和严重程度。在ASD患者的家庭成员中也观察到了知觉一致性和注意风格的差异，以及一系列被认为是遗传易感性的亚临床特征(即，广泛的自闭症表型；BAP)。与在自闭症患者身上观察到的情况类似，有证据表明，与典型发育个体的父母相比，亲属也可能表现出对其视觉场景的局部特征的偏好。这些模式可作为ASD遗传易感性的表型标记。该方案采用眼动跟踪的方法来考察：1)在知觉连贯性(虚幻轮廓和Navon分级刺激)两个任务中的视觉知觉，以及在一个视觉持久化任务(社会和非社会阵列的视觉探索)中的注意。利用家族遗传设计，这项研究将在高功能自闭症患者及其父母身上探索这些视觉策略。此外，该提案还检查了知觉一致性和注意力任务的表现与一系列现有的临床、认知、语言和社会认知数据之间的关系，这些数据来自参与同伴研究的先证者和父母的现有样本。眼动跟踪的使用可以提供对潜在加工策略的洞察，这些加工策略引起知觉偏差和/或注意力和持之以恒，这可能与临床表型重要相关，并作为候选内表型。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurogenetic disorder characterized by social-communication deficits as well as restricted and repetitive interests and behaviors. Differences in perceptual coherence, including a local perceptual bias at the expense of global processing and perseverative visual attention related to circumscribed interests, are thought to underlie key features of ASD. Local and global (i.e., selective attention to parts vs. wholes, respectively) processing abilities rely on different underlying neural correlates, which may correspond to ASD symptomatology and severity. Differences in perceptual coherence and attentional styles have also been observed in family members of individuals with ASD, along with a constellation of subclinical features believed to index genetic liability (i.e., the broad autism phenotype; BAP). Similar to what has been observed in individuals with ASD, evidence suggests that relatives may also demonstrate a preference for local features of their visual scene compared to parents of typically developing individuals. Such patterns may serve as a phenotypic marker of genetic liability to ASD. This proposal employs eye tracking to examine i) visual perception during two tasks of perceptual coherence (illusory contours and the Navon hierarchical stimuli) and attention during one task of visual perseveration (visual exploration of social and non-social arrays). Using a family-genetic design, the study will explore these visual strategies in high functioning individuals with ASD and their parents. Further, the proposal examines performance on perceptual coherence and attentional tasks in relationship to a broad battery of existing clinical, cognitive, language, and social-cognitive data available on an existing sample of probands and parents participating in a companion study. The use of eye tracking may afford insights into underlying processing strategies that give rise to perceptual biases and/or attention and perseveration, which may importantly relate to clinical phenotypes, and serve as candidate endophenotypes.