Study of the Strategies of Visual Perception of Social Scenes During Emotional States Induced to Subjects With an Intrusive Disorder of the Development: Pilot Study

Context: The Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) are severe neurodevelopmental disorders, affecting nearly 1% of the general population. The disorder of social interaction has often been described as resulting from poor emotion recognition, or a bad perception of biological motion. However, the results of studies on these issues are very divergent. The PDD also been described as a disorder of emotion regulation, but few studies address the emotional feelings of individuals with ASD and their neuropsychological implications. Many studies analyzing the effect of emotions induced - or felt - in healthy subjects. The effect of emotion on cognitive or attentional process is often called "emotional effect of interference." As has already been demonstrated, an emotion (eg induced by music or film) results in a change in visual perception of the environment strategies. These non-conscious mechanisms promote interactive synchrony with the surrounding world, especially during social interactions. We then assumed that the alteration of these perceptual-emotional regulation processes in PDD contribute to disorders of social interactions. In the absence of sufficient data in the literature, we wish to establish an exploratory study using the Eye-tracking, to objectify the links between emotional and perceptual processing in PDD.

Objectives: The main objective is to study the effect of induced emotion in the children with ASD on his visual exploration strategies. We assume that the direction of gaze to photographs of different emotional valences in individuals with ASD is not changed by the emotional state in which they are located. We will compare a population of children with PDD in a control population matched for age, sex. Our secondary goal is to study the link between 1) the socio adaptive level (measured by the Vineland 2) the intensity of autistic symptoms (score ADI) and gaze orientation towards social subjects with visual stimuli.

Methods: This is a comparative exploratory pilot study. We'll look at using the eye-tracking, policy terms of the look in a group of children with ASD, in a context of emotional induction (joy, fear, sadness or anger) using of sound stimuli.

Conclusion: This study would better characterize the emotional processing in ASD and generate hypotheses that could be tested in other neurophysiological studies. Moreover, it can contribute to the development of new supported techniques.