Developmental accounts of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) state that infants and children with ASD are spontaneously less attracted by and less proficient in processing social stimuli such as faces. This is hypothesized to partly underlie social communication difficulties in ASD. While in some studies a reduced preference for social stimuli has been shown in individuals with ASD, effect sizes are moderate and vary across studies, stimuli, and designs. Eye tracking, often the methodology of choice to study social preference, conveys information about overt orienting processes but conceals covert attention, possibly resulting in an underestimation of the effects. In this study, we recorded eye tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) during fast periodic visual stimulation to address this issue. We tested 21 boys with ASD (8-12 years old) and 21 typically developing (TD) control boys, matched for age and IQ. Streams of variable images of faces were presented at 6 Hz alongside images of houses presented at 7.5 Hz or vice versa, while children were engaged in an orthogonal task. While frequency-tagged neural responses were larger in response to faces than simultaneously presented houses in both groups, this effect was much larger in TD boys than in boys with ASD. This group difference in saliency of social versus non-social processing is significant after 5 sec of stimulus presentation and holds throughout the entire trial. Although there was no interaction between group and stimulus category for simultaneously recorded eye-tracking data, eye tracking and EEG measures were strongly correlated. We conclude that frequency-tagging EEG, allowing monitoring of both overt and covert processes, provides a fast, objective and reliable measure of decreased preference for social information in ASD.

中文翻译：

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结合了频率标签的脑电图和眼动追踪技术，发现自闭症谱系障碍男孩的社交偏见有所降低。

自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的发展说明指出，患有ASD的婴幼儿自发地较少受到社会刺激（如面孔）的吸引和熟练。据推测，这部分是导致自闭症患者社交障碍的部分原因。尽管在某些研究中，患有自闭症的人对社交刺激的偏好有所降低，但效果大小适中，且在研究，刺激和设计之间存在差异。眼动追踪通常是研究社会偏好的一种选择方法，它传达了有关公开定向过程的信息，但隐藏了隐秘的注意力，可能导致对效果的低估。在这项研究中，我们记录了快速周期性视觉刺激过程中的眼动追踪和脑电图（EEG），以解决此问题。我们测试了21名患有ASD（8-12岁）的男孩和21名典型的发育（TD）对照男孩，这些男孩的年龄和智商均相匹配。在儿童从事正交任务时，脸部可变图像流以6 Hz呈现，房屋图像以7.5 Hz呈现，反之亦然。虽然频率标记的神经反应对面部的反应比两组同时出现的房屋要大，但TD男孩的这种效应远大于ASD的男孩。刺激呈现5秒钟后，社交与非社交过程的显着性存在显着的群体差异，并且在整个试验过程中均如此。尽管在同时记录眼动追踪数据的组和刺激类别之间没有交互作用，但眼动追踪和脑电图测量值之间却有着很强的相关性。我们得出结论，频率标记的脑电图，