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Face-processing timing differences may underlie visual social attention differences between autistic and non-autistic people, and males and females. This study investigates the timing of the effects of neurotype and sex on face-processing, and their dependence on age. We analysed EEG data during upright and inverted photographs of faces from 492 participants from the Longitudinal European Autism Project (141 neurotypical males, 76 neurotypical females, 202 autistic males, 73 autistic females; age 6-30 years). We detected timings of sex/diagnosis effects on event-related potential amplitudes at the posterior-temporal channel P8 with Bootstrapped Cluster-based Permutation Analysis and conducted Growth Curve Analysis (GCA) to investigate the timecourse and dependence on age of neural signals. The periods of influence of neurotype and sex overlapped but differed in onset (respectively, 260 and 310 ms post-stimulus), with sex effects lasting longer. GCA revealed a smaller and later amplitude peak in autistic female children compared to non-autistic female children; this difference decreased in adolescence and was not significant in adulthood. No age-dependent neurotype difference was significant in males. These findings indicate that sex and neurotype influence longer latency face processing and implicates cognitive rather than perceptual processing. Sex may have more overarching effects than neurotype on configural face processing., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Lay Abstract: Autistic individuals are more likely than non-autistic individuals to experience a mental health condition in their lifetime, and this includes externalising and internalising symptoms. We know very little about how different environments and family conditions impact these symptoms for autistic individuals. Improving our understanding of these relationships is important so that we can identify individuals who may be in greater need of support. In this article, we seek to improve our understanding of how environmental and family conditions impact externalising and internalising symptoms in autistic and non-autistic people. To do this, we conducted analyses with two cohorts in very different settings - in Europe and South Africa - to ensure our findings are globally representative. We used advanced statistical methods to establish environmental and family conditions that were similar to each other, and which could be combined into specific 'factors'. We found that four similar 'factors' could be identified in the two cohorts. These were distinguished by personal characteristics and environmental conditions of individuals, and were named Person Characteristics, Family System, Parental and Material Resources. Interestingly, just 'Family System' was associated with internalising and externalising symptoms, and this was the same in both cohorts. We also found that having high traits of autism impacted this relationship between Family System and mental health conditions with opposite directions in the two settings. These results show that characteristics in the Family System are associated with internalising and externalising symptoms, and autistic persons are particularly impacted, reinforcing the notion that family stressors are important to consider when implementing policy and practice related to improving the mental health of autistic people., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: J.T. has acted as a paid consultant and is a current employee of F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG. T.C. has acted as a paid consultant of F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd and Servier and receives royalties for the publication of textbooks for Guilford Press and Sage Publications. J.B. has been in the past 3 years a consultant to/member of advisory boards of/and/or speaker for Janssen Cilag BV, Eli Lilly, Lundbeck, Shire, Roche, Novartis, Medice, and Servier. S.B. receives royalties for the German and Swedish KONTAKT manuals and adaptations of the ADI-R, ADOS, and S.R.S. from Hogrefe Publishers, and has in the past 3 years acted as an author, consultant or lecturer for Medice and Roche. T.B. has served in an advisory or consultancy role for eye level, Infectopharm, Lundbeck, Medice, Neurim Pharmaceuticals, Oberberg GmbH, Roche and Takeda. He received conference support or speaker’s fee by Janssen, Medice and Takeda. He received royalties from Hogrefe, Kohlhammer, CIP Medien and Oxford University Press; the present work is unrelated to these relationships. A.S.J.C. has acted as a paid consultant for F. Hoffman-La Roche and Servier, and has been actively involved in clinical trials managed by both companies. All other authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

Background: Social attention affords learning opportunities across development and may contribute to individual differences in developmental trajectories, such as between male and female individuals, and in neurodevelopmental conditions, such as autism., Methods: Using eye-tracking, we measured social attention in a large cohort of autistic (n = 123) and nonautistic females (n = 107), and autistic (n = 330) and nonautistic males (n = 204), aged 6-30 years. Using mixed Growth Curve Analysis, we modelled sex and diagnostic effects on the temporal dynamics of proportional looking time to three types of social stimuli (lean-static, naturalistic-static, and naturalistic-dynamic) and examined the link between individual differences and dimensional social and nonsocial autistic traits in autistic females and males., Results: In the lean-static stimulus, average face-looking was higher in females than in males of both autistic and nonautistic groups. Differences in the dynamic pattern of face-looking were seen in autistic vs. nonautistic females, but not males, with face-looking peaking later in the trial in autistic females. In the naturalistic-dynamic stimulus, average face-looking was higher in females than in males of both groups; changes in the dynamic pattern of face looking were seen in autistic vs. nonautistic males, but not in females, with a steeper peak in nonautistic males. Lower average face-looking was associated with higher observer-measured autistic characteristics in autistic females, but not in males., Conclusions: Overall, we found stronger social attention in females to a similar degree in both autistic and nonautistic groups. Nonetheless, the dynamic profiles of social attention differed in different ways in autistic females and males compared to their nonautistic peers, and autistic traits predicted trends of average face-looking in autistic females. These findings support the role of social attention in the emergence of sex-related differences in autistic characteristics, suggesting an avenue to phenotypic stratification., (© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.)

Background: Sociocommunicative difficulties, including abnormalities in eye contact, are core diagnostic features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Many studies have used eye tracking to measure reduced attention to faces in autistic people; however, most of this work has not taken advantage of eye-tracking temporal resolution to examine temporal profiles of attention., Methods: We used growth curve analysis to model attention to static social scenes as a function of time in a large (N = 650) sample of autistic participants and neurotypical participants across a wide age range (6-30 years)., Results: The model yielded distinct temporal profiles of attention to faces in the groups. Initially, both groups showed a relatively high probability of attending to faces, followed by decline after several seconds. The neurotypical participants, however, were significantly more likely to return their attention to faces in the latter part of each 20-second trial, with increasing probability with age. In contrast, the probability of returning to the face in the autistic participants remained low across development. In participants with ASD, more atypical profiles of attention were associated with lower Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales communication scores and a higher curvature in one data-driven cluster correlated with symptom severity., Conclusions: These findings show that social attention not only is reduced in ASD, but also differs in its temporal dynamics. The neurotypical participants became more sophisticated in how they deployed their social attention across age, a pattern that was significantly reduced in the participants with ASD, possibly reflecting delayed acquisition of social expertise., (Copyright © 2020 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)