Autistic traits modulate neural responses to social signals during natural vision

Abstract

Impairments in social perception, a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), are also evident at subclinical levels in the general population. However, it remains unclear how such variation in autistic traits modulate neural processing of different types of social information. Here, we investigated whether autistic traits in neurotypical individuals are associated with neural responses to a broad array of social perceptual features during viewing naturalistic stimuli using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We also tested the generalizability of these effects across two experiments. Ninety-seven participants completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and watched a set of 96 movie clips and a full movie during an fMRI scan. Intensity of 126 social features in the movie stimuli was continuously annotated by independent observers, and 44 most reliably rated features were used to model neural responses. We examined how consistently the responses to each social feature were dependent on the participants AQ scores. Replicable AQ-dependent neural responses to social features were found in both datasets. The temporal cortex and especially the superior temporal gyrus (STG), served as a central "hub" where autistic traits consistently modulated responses to social features across datasets. Different AQ subscales also revealed distinct association patterns in other brain regions. These findings indicate that autism-related traits broadly influence neural processing of naturalistic social signals, providing insight into how characteristics of autistic symptoms relate to socioemotional processing.