The Influence of Gaze on Complex Visual Search in Individuals who Exhibit Varying Degrees of Autistic Traits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studying the influence of social gaze is integral to understanding the neurocognitive basis of autistic traits, specifically social communication deficits, which are thought to be attributed to diminished social motivation. Since it is widely accepted that impaired joint attention is associated with these difficulties, it is logical to expect that atypical gaze perception due to diminished social motivation would occur in individuals with more autistic traits. The Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), a reliable and widely used proxy to quantify autistic traits in research, was administered in a sample of undergraduate psychology students. A complex and realistic visual search paradigm was used to investigate whether the presence of autistic traits reduces processing of social gaze due to an associated lack of social motivation. In Experiment 1, visual search performance was compared in the presence of a social cue (a person) and a non-social cue (a lamp), that was oriented either congruently (facing towards the half of the scene containing the cue), neutrally (facing forward), or incongruently (facing away from the half of the scene containing the cue). Eye movement analyses revealed that the experimental design may have prevented expected effects from emerging. The design of Experiment 2 was simplified to include only congruent and incongruent social cues, while participants performed the visual search task. Eye movements were not recorded due to COVID-19 restrictions, but reaction time (RT) analysis revealed that participants possessing more autistic traits demonstrated slower visual search performance. However, there was no effect of congruency. The results contribute to evidence of an association between autistic traits and visual search performance difficulties when processing complex stimuli.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".