Abstract: PURPOSE: Gaze is a representative and salient social cue. Individuals can perceive social attributes from averted gaze, generating attentional shifts. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) pay less attention to averted gaze and generate less attentional shifts. Like individuals with ASD, individuals with Autism-Like Traits (ALT) also show deficits in attentional shifts and cognitive flexibility. However, there is still a lack of empirical research to explore the differences in attentional shifts between typically developing individuals and individuals with ALT. In addition, by comparing the attentional shifts of two groups based on averted gaze faces and face-like objects, we can explore whether the difference in attentional shifts is due to the abnormal processing of faces.
METHODS: Using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ), we divided participants into high and low AQ groups. And we used averted gaze faces and face-like objects as the cueing stimuli in the gaze-cueing task. The cueing stimuli were presented upright and inverted in Experiments 1 and 2.
RESULTS: The results showed that different from the low AQ group, the high AQ group generated strong cueing effects from the upright averted gaze faces and face-like objects. At the same time, the inverted cueing stimuli did affect the subsequent cueing effects of the individual. On the one hand, disrupting the global configuration in the inverted averted gaze faces would weaken the cueing effect generated by individuals with low AQ. On the other hand, disrupting the global configuration in the inverted face-like objects would weaken the cueing effect generated by individuals with high AQ.
CONCLUSIONS: The present study shows the differences in attentional shifts induced by averted gaze faces and face-like objects between high and low AQ groups. Compared with the low AQ group, the high AQ group perceived the social attributes of the face-like objects through local processing enhancement, resulting in stronger attentional shifts. This result further indicates that individuals can generate attentional shifts by processing local features of face-like objects, similar to averted gaze. At the same time, the global configuration of face-like objects plays a facilitating role. This study provides a reference for the attentional shifts based on social attributes in individuals with ALT and provides new insights into the processing mechanism of face-like objects.

Key words: averted gaze faces, autism-like traits, attentional shifts, face-like objects