EEG frequency tagging evidence of intact social interaction recognition in adults with autism

Abstract

To explain the social difficulties in autism, a large amount of research has been conducted on the neural correlates of social perception. However, this research has mostly used basic social stimuli (e.g. eyes, faces, hands, single agent), not resembling the complexity of what we encounter in our daily social lives, and as such, the situations people with autism experience difficulties in. A more complex stimulus that we do come across often and is also highly relevant for social functioning is that of third-party social interactions. Here, we investigated if individuals with and without autism process third-party social interactions differently. More specifically, we measured neural responses to social scenes depicting either social interaction or not with an electroencephalogram (EEG) frequency tagging task and compared these responses between adults with and without autism (N = 61). The results revealed an enhanced response to social scenes with interaction, replicating previous findings in a neurotypical sample (Oomen et al., 2022). Crucially, this effect was found in both groups with no difference between them. This suggest that social interaction recognition is not anomalous in adults with autism and cannot explain the social difficulties adults with autism experience. Lay abstractPeople with autism have social difficulties and are thought to experience the world differently. To better understand these differences, research has studied how the brain of people with and without autism processes social stimuli. However, this research has mostly used basic social stimuli (e.g. eyes, faces, hands, and single agents). Such stimuli do not resemble the complexity of daily life, where we typically do not come across isolated body parts, but instead have to make sense of complex social scenes with multiple people. To do so, it is imperative that we are able to recognize social interaction. Hence, if social interaction processing is anomalous, this could have pervasive consequences for social functioning more generally. Here, we used brain imaging to test if adults with autism process social interaction scenes differently than adults without autism. In line with previous findings from a neurotypical sample (Oomen et al. (2022), we found that social scenes depicting interaction elicited stronger brain responses than social scenes not depicting interaction. Crucially, this effect was found in both groups with no difference between them. These findings suggest that the fundamental process of social interaction recognition is not anomalous in adults with autism.