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。知觉连贯性的差异，包括以牺牲全局处理为代价的局部知觉偏差和与有限兴趣相关的持续视觉注意力，被认为是ASD的关键特征的基础。本地和全局（即，选择性注意 部分对整体）处理能力依赖于不同的潜在神经相关物，其可对应于ASD的病理学和严重性。在ASD患者的家庭成员中也观察到知觉连贯性和注意力风格的差异，沿着一系列亚临床特征，这些特征被认为是遗传易感性的指标（即，广泛自闭症表型; BAP）。与在ASD患者中观察到的情况类似，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视觉场景局部特征的偏好。这种模式可以作为遗传易感性ASD的表型标记。该建议采用眼动追踪来检查i）在知觉连贯性（虚幻轮廓和Navon分层刺激）的两个任务期间的视觉感知和在视觉持续性（社交和非社交阵列的视觉探索）的一个任务期间的注意。使用家族遗传设计，该研究将在ASD高功能个体及其父母中探索这些视觉策略。此外，该提案还检查了感知连贯性和注意力任务的表现，这些任务与现有的临床，认知，语言和社会认知数据的广泛组合有关，这些数据可用于参与同伴研究的先证者和父母的现有样本。眼动追踪的使用可以深入了解导致感知偏差和/或注意力和持续行为的潜在处理策略，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.