Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
EXPLORA, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Autism Res. 2023 Jun;16(6):1111-1123. doi: 10.1002/aur.2929. Epub 2023 Apr 11.
To explain the social difficulties in autism, many studies have been conducted on social stimuli processing. However, this research has mostly used basic social stimuli (e.g., eyes, faces, hands, single agent), not resembling the complexity of what we encounter in our daily social lives and what people with autism experience difficulties with. Third-party social interactions are complex stimuli that we come across often and are also highly relevant for social functioning. Interestingly, the existing behavioral studies point to altered social interaction processing in autism. However, it is not clear whether this is due to altered recognition or altered interpretation of social interactions. Here, we specifically investigated the recognition of social interaction in adults with and without autism. More precisely, we measured neural responses to social scenes depicting either social interaction or not with an electroencephalogram frequency tagging task and compared these responses between adults with and without autism (N = 61). The results revealed an enhanced response to social scenes with interaction, replicating previous findings in a neurotypical sample. Crucially, this effect was found in both groups, with no difference between them. This suggests that social interaction recognition is not atypical in adults with autism. Taken together with the previous behavioral evidence, our study thus suggests that individuals with autism are able to recognize social interactions, but that they might not extract the same information from those interactions or that they might use the extracted information differently.
为了解释自闭症患者的社交困难，许多研究都针对社交刺激处理进行了研究。然而，这些研究大多使用基本的社交刺激（例如眼睛、脸、手、单一主体），而不是类似于我们在日常生活和自闭症患者所经历的社交中所遇到的复杂性。第三方社交互动是我们经常遇到的复杂刺激，对社交功能也非常重要。有趣的是，现有的行为研究表明自闭症患者的社交互动处理存在改变。然而，尚不清楚这是由于对社交互动的识别改变还是解释改变所致。在这里，我们专门研究了自闭症患者和非自闭症患者对社交互动的识别。更确切地说，我们使用脑电图频率标记任务测量了对描绘社交互动或不描绘社交互动的社交场景的神经反应，并比较了自闭症患者和非自闭症患者之间的这些反应（N=61）。结果显示，对有互动的社交场景的反应增强，在神经典型样本中重现了先前的发现。至关重要的是，这种效应在两组中都存在，且两组之间没有差异。这表明自闭症患者的社交互动识别并不异常。综合之前的行为证据，我们的研究表明，自闭症患者能够识别社交互动，但他们可能无法从这些互动中提取相同的信息，或者他们可能以不同的方式使用提取的信息。
