Abstract: PURPOSE: Animacy, an attribute that distinguishes animals from non-living things, carries survival-relevant information and heralds social interaction. However, whether animal cues are prioritized in human attentional processes and whether the attentional preference for animacy is associated with observers’ autistic traits — a primary indicator of social abilities in general populations, remain controversial.
METHODS: This study explored these issues using a classic cueing paradigm, in which the observers’ allocation of attention to pairs of animal and inanimate picture cues was measured based on their reaction times to the probes following these cues. Faster probe detection responses following the animal cues would indicate an attentional bias towards animacy. In addition, we varied the cue duration from 100 ms to 1000 ms to examine the time course of this attention effect. Participants’ autistic traits were measured using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) questionnaire.
RESULTS: We found a significant and enduring attentional bias for animals over inanimate cues in observers with relatively low, but not high, autistic traits. Moreover, there was a negative correlation between individual AQ scores and the attentional bias towards animals, especially at the early orienting stage. These results could not be simply explained by low-level visual differences between animal and inanimate pictures, as inverted or phase-scrambled picture cues did not yield a similar pattern.
CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the significant status of animacy in selective attention and reveal the link between impaired orienting to animals and high autistic traits, further suggesting a broader scope of social attentional deficits in autistic disorders.

Key words: Attention bias, time course, animacy, animals, autistic traits