Not So Fast: Autistic traits and Anxious Apprehension in Real-World Visual Search Scenarios

Autistic individuals have shown superior performance in simple, albeit difficult, visual search tasks. We compared eye movements and behavioral markers across two visual search tasks based on real-world scenes in young adults. Context-aided search increased speed and accuracy for all groups. Autistic adults (n = 29) were on average consistently slower and less accurate than a non-anxious neurotypical comparison group (n = 48), but similar to neurotypical adults with elevated anxious apprehension (n = 26). Dimensional analyses suggest that autism traits, not anxious apprehension, are most associated with search efficiency of naturalistic stimuli suggesting that autistic individuals can effectively integrate contextual information to aid visual search, but that advantages in less visually complex tasks, reported in previous studies, may not transfer to situations involving real-world scenes.