| Autistic like traits(ALT)is a common personality characteristic.As a sub-clinical symptom of autism spectrum disorder(ASD),ALT is believed to be continuous with ASD and share the gene underpinnings and risk factors with it.More researches are needed to delineate ALT’s effect on individuals’ cognitive abilities as well as mental health.Moreover,investigating ALT individuals can also help deepen our understanding on ASD’s pathology.In everyday life,people have to deal with numerous information from different sources.Selecting useful and task-related information and neglecting unrelated targets is one of the key abilities for each one.The restricted attention capacity requires people to be able to pick important one and drop un-significant ones.Many factors can impact attention.On the one hand,attention can be modified by individuals’ personality.High ALT individuals perform better in the visual search task when dealing with simple figures,but recent researches reveal worse performance of ALT individuals when social or emotional stimuli are presented.On the other hand,the guiding effect of working memory will influence individuals’ selective attention.When objects stored in the working memory are similar to targets,they will help subjects to accomplish tasks.The present study is trying to investigate the guiding effects of working memory on selective attention in ALT individuals,aiming to unravel the guiding effects’ pattern in different ALT groups.The Delayed Match-to-Sample task(DMS)was applied in the present study to verify the well-established guiding effect of working memory on attention.In this task,the items stored in the working memory were present in the subsequent visual search tasks as distractors in the match condition,while not present in the conflict condition.And the neural condition contains no distractor.It was found that the more similarities between distractors and targets,the more processes will be done on targets.Experiment 1 used irregular figures as working memory’s items and neutral words as targets.Results revealed no effect of working memory’s items on targets.Although high ALT group’s reaction times are longer than low ALT group,this difference is not significant.Experiment 2 used social stimuli as targets.Results revealed a significant longer reaction times of high ALT group compared to the low ALT group,but no guiding effect of working memory on the search targets.This result indicated that social stimuli has no effect on the reaction times of attention.Experiment 3 investigated the guiding effect of working memory on the emotional stimuli.Similarly,significantly longer reaction times were found in the high ALT groups with no guiding effect of working memory’s items on the visual search targets.Of note,attention reaction times on stimuli with different valence were significantly different from each other.The present study found no guiding effect of working memory’s items on targets of visual search task when they are present as distractors.It is also revealed that high ALT group’s reaction times are generally longer than low ALT group.Finally,the reaction times of social stimuli were found to be longer than emotional stimuli and both emotional and social stimuli’s reaction times are significantly longer than neutral stimuli in the high ALT group.Moreover,it was found that subjects were prone to process negative stimuli(shorter reaction times),indicating a evolutional attentional tendency to negativity of human beings.The present study deepens our understanding of ALT individuals’ shortcomings in cognitive abilities,especially when dealing with social and emotional stimuli.The present study found that individuals with autistic like trais have a different attention tendency towards social stimuli,indicating altered attentional bias in social stimuli compared with emotional stimuli. |
