Individuals with high autism traits show top-down attention bias towards threatening stimuli

Individuals with autistic traits (AT) are widely distributed in the general population. Strengthening understanding of AT can provide a broader perspective for autism research as well as more accurate diagnosis and personalized treatment plans for clinical practice. Previous studies on attention bias among high-AT individuals have yielded inconsistent results, which may relate to different stages of attention. In this study, we selected two groups with high and low level AT from the general population, and then adopted the odd-one-out search task, combined with Event-related potential (ERP) technique, conducted both attention orientation and attention dissociation tasks, to explore attention bias and electroencephalogram (EEG) characteristics towards threatening emotional faces in these groups. The behavioral data showed no accelerated attention orientation to angry faces and neutral faces; however, there was attention dissociation difficulty for angry faces. Compared with low-AT individuals, the EEG results showed that high-AT individuals have acceleration of attention orientation and attention dissociation difficulty for threatening emotional faces. From the perspective of top-down concept-driven processing, these findings suggest that high-AT individuals have attention bias for cognitive processing of threatening stimuli, which is mainly due to acceleration of attention orientation and attention dissociation difficulties for threatening information.