Lack of privileged access to awareness for rewarding social scenes in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Reduced social motivation is hypothesised to underlie social behavioural symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The extent to which rewarding social stimuli are granted privileged access to awareness in ASD is currently unknown. We use continuous flash suppression to investigate whether individuals with and without ASD show privileged access to awareness for social over nonsocial rewarding scenes that are closely matched for stimulus features. Strong evidence for a privileged access to awareness for rewarding social over nonsocial scenes was observed in neurotypical adults. No such privileged access was seen in ASD individuals, and moderate support for the null model was noted. These results suggest that the purported deficits in social motivation in ASD may extend to early processing mechanisms

Eurosibs: towards robust measurement of infant neurocognitive predictors of Autism across Europe

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social communication skills and flexible behaviour. Developing new treatment approaches for ASD requires early identification of the factors that influence later behavioural outcomes. One fruitful research paradigm has been the prospective study of infants with a first degree relative with ASD, who have around a 20% likelihood of developing ASD themselves. Early findings have identified a range of candidate neurocognitive markers for later ASD such as delayed attention shifting or neural responses to faces, but given the early stage of the field most sample sizes are small and replication attempts remain rare. The Eurosibs consortium is a European multisite neurocognitive study of infants with an older sibling with ASD conducted across nine sites in five European countries. In this manuscript, we describe the selection and standardization of our common neurocognitive testing protocol. We report data quality assessments across sites, showing that neurocognitive measures hold great promise for cross-site consistency in diverse populations. We discuss our approach to ensuring robust data analysis pipelines and boosting future reproducibility. Finally, we summarise challenges and opportunities for future multi-site research efforts

The feeling of me feeling for you: Interoception, alexithymia and empathy in autism.

Following recent evidence for a link between interoception, emotion and empathy, we investigated relationships between these factors in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). 26 adults with ASD and 26 healthy participants completed tasks measuring interoception, alexithymia and empathy. ASD participants with alexithymia demonstrated lower cognitive and affective empathy than ASD participants without alexithymia. ASD participants showed reduced interoceptive sensitivity (IS), and also reduced interoceptive awareness (IA). IA was correlated with empathy and alexithymia, but IS was related to neither. Alexithymia fulfilled a mediating role between IA and empathy. Our findings are suggestive of an alexithymic subgroup in ASD, with distinct interoceptive processing abilities, and have implications for diagnosis and interventions