Circumscribed Interests in Autism: Can Animals Potentially Re-engage Social Attention?

A prominent subtype of restricted and repetitive behaviour or interests (RRBs) in autistic children comprises circumscribed interests (CI). CIs occur in 75-95% of children on the autism spectrum, are highly fixated and repetitive interests and generally center on non-social and idiosyncratic topics. The increased salience of CI objects for autistic children also results in a decreased attention to social stimuli and can interfere with social interactions, relations and activities. A parallel line of robust evidence points to greater social engagement and lesser social anxiety in autistic children in the presence of animals with impacts on crucial biomarker indices including skin conductance and salivary cortisol. Neuroimaging evidence also reports a greater activation of reward systems in the brain in response to animal stimuli in autistic individuals, whereas a similar activation is not present for human faces. Behavioral evidence as seen in studies using an eye tracking of visual gaze patterns also reveal a comparatively higher preference for animal stimuli in autistic individuals. The potentially greater social reward attached to animals in ASD, puts forward the interesting and yet unexplored possibility of the presence of competing animal stimuli reducing the disproportionately high visual preference to CI objects. We examined this possibility through a paired preference study using images of human and animal faces paired with CI and non-CI objects, within an eye tracking paradigm. 32 children (ASD n=16; TD n=16) participated in the study (3391 valid observations). Autistic children showed a significantly greater visual attention to CI objects across their pairings with non-CI objects and social images. Within typical controls, a significantly higher visual attention was seen for social images regardless of their pairing with CI or NCI objects. A key finding was that, while pairing with a CI object reduced the overall amount of social attention elicited in the ASD group, the reduction in attention was not similar for human and animal faces. When paired with CI objects, animal faces elicited greater social attention from autistic children, than human faces.These results thus suggest that social attention deficits in ASD may not be uniform across human and animal stimuli. Animals may comprise a potentially powerful stimulus category modulating visual attention in ASD.