State anxiety modulates the effect of emotion cues on visual temporal sensitivity in autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Atypical processing of stimulus inputs across a range of sensory modalities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is widely reported. Sensory processing is known to be influenced by bodily internal states such as physiological arousal and anxiety. As a sizeable proportion of ASD reportedly have co‐morbid anxiety disorders that are linked with dysregulated arousal, we investigated if face emotion arousal cues influenced visual sensory sensitivity (indexed by temporal resolution) in ASD (n = 20) compared to a matched group of typically developed individuals (TD, n = 21). We asked further if emotion‐cued changes in visual sensitivity were associated with individual differences in state and trait anxiety. Participants reported the laterality of the second of two consecutive Gaussian‐blob flashes in a visual temporal order judgment task (v‐TOJ), demanding higher‐level visual processing. The key manipulation was presenting a task‐irrelevant face emotion cue briefly at unexpected time points preceding the task‐relevant flashes. Disgust vs. Neutral emotion signals significantly enhanced the visual temporal resolution in ASD. Individual state‐anxiety scores showed a fair correlative trend with the emotion‐cued changes in temporal resolution (Disgust versus Neutral) in ASD but missed statistical significance. Both these effects were absent in TD. The results show that individual state‐anxiety levels likely modulate the effect of emotions on visual temporal sensitivity in ASD. The findings support a nuanced approach to understand the disparate sensory features in ASD, by factoring in the interplay of the individual reactivity to environmental affective information and the severity of anxiety.