Conclusions

The current study provides new insight into the field of emotion perception for

individuals who are typically developing and those who are diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Through the direct exploration of gaze behavior, information about the visual sampling of facial features was collected during the perception of novel dynamic audio-visual emotion (DAVE) stimuli. These stimuli were digitally altered to allow for the presentation of both congruent and incongruent audio-visual affect. These results replicate and expand previous knowledge of emotion perception in typically developing individuals, as well as afford researchers and clinicians a foundation from which to explore the social deficits found in individuals with ASDs.

Results indicated that all participants were able to accurately identify happy, angry, fearful, and neutral emotions. The increased task difficulty of the incongruent condition was evidenced by the increase in response times for both groups. Whereas TD individuals showed a bias toward the visual affective information when asked to determine the emotion portrayed, individuals with ASD did not show the same preference for visual affective information.

Individuals with ASD showed a relative deficit in emotion identification, suggesting that they did not benefit from the provision of biological motion (i.e., dynamic stimuli) and bimodal affective information (i.e., audio-visual) to the same extent as did their TD peers when presented with congruent stimuli. The fact that a relative reduction in accuracy occurred for the ASD group despite comparable response times between groups, and that responses were not biased toward facial affect, suggests that disparities in emotion perception occurred early in the perceptual stage of processing.

The early, automatic integration and perception of affective cues appeared to rapidly influence visual scanning behavior. Participants demonstrated similar fixation patterns during the perception of congruent movies, in that both individuals with ASD and TD individuals showed a preference for the eye region. Under more complex conditions, requiring the detection of

incongruence and subsequently making a decision regarding emotion identification, group differences emerged in visual approach. When TD participants perceive incongruence at the early stage of integration, their visual fixation patterns were efficiently altered as a function of the extraordinary nature of the stimuli. However, because of impairments in the automatic perception of emotional information in individuals with ASD, their visual fixation patterns were not as efficiently adapted to compensate for the increasing complexity of the task. Typically- developing individuals showed an increased preference for the most salient regions during the more complex task, increasing fixation duration to the face, and specifically to the core region, in order to maintain the same level of accuracy. In contrast, the individuals with ASD did not show the same increase to the face or to the core region. The exception to this is that the increase in and distribution among the core regions (i.e., eyes, nose, mouth) remained comparable for both groups during congruent and incongruent movies. Differences in the overall reliance on the core region likely influenced the subsequent emotion judgments, as TD individuals were more likely to respond with the facial emotion and showed a greater preference for fixation on the core region. It appears that this influence emerges particularly very early in perception, as the TD group also showed a specific increase in their initial fixations to the core region.

The perceptual differences that emerged and the difficulties in emotion perception, albeit of a small effect, demonstrated by the individuals with ASD in this controlled experimental study, have great implications for social skills intervention research. The presentation of

congruent and incongruent movies more closely simulates real-life social encounters, wherein individuals must rapidly discern the mental state and intentions of others amidst a variety of stimuli. Even when presented in brief segments, without the additional pressure of a face-to-face social interaction, differences in performance emerged for the ASD group in this study.

Furthermore, the visual scanning patterns were negatively associated with symptoms associated with ASDs, and specifically with level of social impairment. As individuals in this study were high-functioning individuals ASDs without cognitive impairments, it is logical to predict that more pronounced differences in visual scanning strategies would be found in individuals with more profound social impairments.

As such, the results of the current study highlight the importance of developing social skills interventions programs that target these areas of weakness in individuals with ASD. Specifically, intervention programs should utilize brief, dynamic stimuli that provide audio- visual information with the aim of improving efficiency in the rapid integration of information and the perception of configural changes that signal specific emotions. Moreover, individuals with ASD would be well served by intervention programs designed for practice in the detection of conflict between social cues (e.g., incongruent facial affect, prosody, semantic content). In addition, consideration of both response time and accuracy findings suggest that individuals with ASD in this study were both impacted by a speed-accuracy trade-off and that they were unaware of their inaccuracies. Individuals with ASD may therefore benefit from interventions that

providing immediate feedback about performance and allow for the repetition of stimuli to support improved accuracy of responding. Finally, the evidence for particular difficulties that emerged during a relatively more complex task (i.e., both congruent and incongruent movies together) emphasizes the importance of designing social skills interventions that more closely

simulate real-world social interactions. Such interventions might require emotion or social judgments under a cognitive load or by otherwise increasing the complexity of stimulus context (e.g., distraction). One potential framework for such interventions might be that of programs aimed at supporting executive functioning skills (e.g., cognitive flexibility, divided or alternating attention tasks).