Swinburne
Browse

Insensitivity to fearful emotion for early ERP components in high autistic tendency is associated with lower magnocellular efficiency

Download (2.44 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2024-07-11, 09:20 authored by Adelaide Burt, Laila Hugrass, Tash Frith-Belvedere, David CrewtherDavid Crewther
Low spatial frequency (LSF) visual information is extracted rapidly from fearful faces, suggesting magnocellular involvement. Autistic phenotypes demonstrate altered magnocellular processing, which we propose contributes to a decreased P100 evoked response to LSF fearful faces. Here, we investigated whether rapid processing of fearful facial expressions differs for groups of neurotypical adults with low and high scores on the Autistic Spectrum Quotient (AQ). We created hybrid face stimuli with low and high spatial frequency filtered, fearful, and neutral expressions. Fearful faces produced higher amplitude P100 responses than neutral faces in the low AQ group, particularly when the hybrid face contained a LSF fearful expression. By contrast, there was no effect of fearful expression on P100 amplitude in the high AQ group. Consistent with evidence linking magnocellular differences with autistic personality traits, our non-linear VEP results showed that the high AQ group had higher amplitude K2.1 responses than the low AQ group, which is indicative of less efficient magnocellular recovery. Our results suggest that magnocellular LSF processing of a human face may be the initial visual cue used to rapidly and automatically detect fear, but that this cue functions atypically in those with high autistic tendency.

History

Available versions

PDF (Published version)

ISSN

1662-5161

Journal title

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Volume

11

Article number

article no. 495

Pagination

495-

Publisher

Frontiers Research Foundation

Copyright statement

Copyright © 2017 Burt, Hugrass, Frith-Belvedere and Crewther. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Language

eng

Usage metrics

    Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Keywords

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC