2024-12-09 ヒューストン大学(UH)
<関連情報>
- https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2024/december/12092024-autism-faces-children-griffin.php
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads7359
- https://www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S2451-9022(24)00252-0/abstract
目は脳の窓:目の動きを捉えることで、自閉症の顔処理をより理解する Eyes are windows to the brain: Capturing eye movements to better understand face processing in autism
Jason Griffin
Science Published:7 Nov 2024
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads7359
My brother and I have always been best friends. We grew up together, rode bikes together, and played video games together. As children, he did not speak or make eye contact much and struggled to interact socially. I do not remember exactly when I knew my brother had autism, but I knew we would be best friends forever because he was my younger brother. I wanted to help improve the lives of people like my brother, which is why I worked to earn a PhD and become a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist. At each step along the way (e.g., being the first in my family to earn an undergraduate and doctoral degree, publishing my first autism research article), my brother and I have always been, and will be, together.
There are many children in the world who are like my brother; the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that 1 in 36 children have an autism diagnosis. Autism is a complex and heterogeneous neurodevelopmental condition, but one thing is present in all autistic children—difficulty in social communication (1). To understand how consistently social communication processes are affected in individuals with autism, I have led a series of evidence synthesis projects over the past 3 years that evaluates how face recognition (2), episodic memory (3), and neural specialization for faces (4) are affected in autism. First, from a collection of more than 100 studies, I noted that individuals with autism exhibited a near full–standard deviation reduction in face recognition compared with neurotypical individuals, a finding that generalized across age, sex, and intelligence quotient (IQ) (2). To determine whether these differences in face recognition were specific to social information, I conducted a followup evidence synthesis study to evaluate how basic recognition processes are affected in autism. Individuals with autism showed small reductions in recognition for objects (e.g., words, pictures), but recognition difficulty significantly increased for recognition of social information (e.g., recall of social stories, recall of real previous social encounters) (3). I also extended this work to understand the neural bases of face processing in autism. Specifically, I led a team of postgraduate researchers who demonstrated that autistic individuals show less neural specialization for faces compared with neurotypical peers (4). This series of projects has provided a strong foundation for robust face-processing differences across the autism spectrum.
Reduced social attention, or looking at faces, is a primary driver of face-processing differences in autism (5). When someone looks less at faces, particularly across development, their neural specialization for faces is reduced, which can attenuate social communication skills, including face and emotion recognition, and higher-order social cognitive skills such as perspective-taking and theory of mind. Given its centrality to autism, I have explored social attention in multiple interdisciplinary contexts that combine clinical, cognitive, and developmental psychology with neuroscience, computer and data science, and clinical trial methodologies to make innovative contributions to our understanding of autism.
時空間眼球運動ダイナミクスから、自閉症児の初期視覚処理における顔の優先順位付けの変化が明らかになる Spatiotemporal Eye Movement Dynamics Reveal Altered Face Prioritization in Early Visual Processing Among Children With Autism
Jason W. Griffin∙ Adam Naples∙ Raphael Bernier∙ … ∙ Frederick Shicl ∙ James C. McPartland for the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials…
Biological Psychiatry Published:September 3, 2024
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2024.08.017
Abstract
Background
Reduced social attention—looking at faces—is one of the most common manifestations of social difficulty in autism that is central to social development. Although reduced social attention is well characterized in autism, qualitative differences in how social attention unfolds across time remains unknown.
Methods
We used a computational modeling (i.e., hidden Markov modeling) approach to assess and compare the spatiotemporal dynamics of social attention in a large, well-characterized sample of children with autism (n = 280) and neurotypical children (n = 119) (ages 6–11) who completed 3 social eye-tracking assays at 3 longitudinal time points (baseline, 6 weeks, 24 weeks).
Results
Our analysis supported the existence of 2 common eye movement patterns that emerged across 3 eye-tracking assays. A focused pattern was characterized by small face regions of interest, which had high a probability of capturing fixations early in visual processing. In contrast, an exploratory pattern was characterized by larger face regions of interest, with a lower initial probability of fixation and more nonsocial regions of interest. In the context of social perception, children with autism showed significantly more exploratory eye movement patterns than neurotypical children across all social perception assays and all 3 longitudinal time points. Eye movement patterns were associated with clinical features of autism, including adaptive function, face recognition, and autism symptom severity.
Conclusions
Decreased likelihood of precisely looking at faces early in social visual processing may be an important feature of autism that is associated with autism-related symptomology and may reflect less visual sensitivity to face information.
