Buehler Raimund, Ansorge Ulrich, Silani Giorgia
Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 5, 1010, Vienna, Austria.
Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Sci Rep. 2024 Dec 3;14(1):30102. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-79210-8.
Attention to social stimuli is a key component of social behavior and facilitates the development of fundamental social skills. Studies investigating social attention in neurotypical or neurodiverse populations have often relied on screen-based experiments using static images or videos, which lack the sensory richness and reciprocity present in real-life social interactions. This can possibly be attributed to the challenges one encounters when creating naturalistic experiments, such as dealing with dynamically moving areas of interest (AOIs), which require either time-intensive manual coding or restraining of participants. Here, we present findings from an experimental paradigm using unrestrained mobile eye-tracking and a face detection algorithm (MTCNN) to measure fixation rates during a semi-structured, face-to-face interview. Data from N = 62 healthy adult participants was analyzed for gaze behavior and related to participants' autistic traits. We observed a significant negative correlation between fixation rates on the eye region averaged over the entire interaction and scores on the autism spectrum quotient (AQ) (r = -0.14), indicating participants with high autistic traits fixated less frequently on the eye region. We also compared different types of interview questions (open vs. closed) to explore whether the reduction in fixation rates was more pronounced for specific time intervals during the interview. Lastly, we discuss both possibilities for extensions as well as limitations of the presented paradigm that could serve as inspiration for future research.
对社会刺激的关注是社会行为的关键组成部分，并有助于基本社交技能的发展。研究神经典型或神经多样人群中的社会注意力的实验，通常依赖于使用静态图像或视频的基于屏幕的实验，而这些实验缺乏现实生活中社交互动所具有的感官丰富性和互动性。这可能归因于创建自然主义实验时遇到的挑战，例如处理动态移动的感兴趣区域（AOI），这需要耗时的手动编码或对参与者进行限制。在这里，我们展示了一项实验范式的研究结果，该范式使用无约束的移动眼动追踪和面部检测算法（MTCNN）来测量半结构化面对面访谈期间的注视率。对来自N = 62名健康成年参与者的数据进行了注视行为分析，并将其与参与者的自闭症特征相关联。我们观察到在整个互动过程中平均在眼睛区域的注视率与自闭症谱系商数（AQ）得分之间存在显著的负相关（r = -0.14），这表明自闭症特征高的参与者在眼睛区域的注视频率较低。我们还比较了不同类型的访谈问题（开放式与封闭式），以探讨在访谈的特定时间间隔内注视率的降低是否更为明显。最后，我们讨论了所提出范式的扩展可能性和局限性，这些可能为未来的研究提供灵感。
