Visuospatial Attention and Autism Spectrum Trait Expression

Pseudoneglect (PN: Bowers & Heilman, 1980) references neurotypical leftward attentional bias reflective of right hemisphere (RH) specialization for spatial attention. Phasic visual cues can alter PN magnitude (McCourt et al., 2005). Tonic leftward bisection error for Uncued (UC) lines and its modulation with left (LC) and right (RC) cues were confirmed. Reported Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) neurobehavioral concomitants include greater lateralized RH function (Floris et al., 2015), narrowed visuospatial attentional spotlight (Robertson et al., 2013), reduced leftward bias in the grayscales task (English et al., 2015), and facial processing deficits. Neurotypical individuals? judgments for chimeric faces and cued line bisection tasks were recorded, and analyzed as a function of their Autism Spectrum-Quotient (ASQ) scores. We find two distinct visual attention processing differences associated with high autistic trait expression. ASQ score, handedness, gender, and age were predictive of PN modulation UC to RC and degree of leftward bias for chimeric faces