State-Anxiety Modulates the Effect of Emotion Cues on Visual Temporal Sensitivity in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Atypical processing of stimulus inputs across a range of sensory modalities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are widely reported. Sensory processing is known to be influenced by bodily internal states such as physiological arousal and anxiety. Since a sizeable proportion of ASD individuals 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 an ASD group (n=20) compared to a matched group of typically-developed individuals (TD, n=21). We asked further if emotion-cued changes in visual sensitivity 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 enhanced the visual temporal resolution in ASD individuals. Furthermore, individual state-anxiety scores correlated with the emotion-cued change of temporal resolution (Disgust vs Neutral) in the ASD group. Both these effects were absent in the TD group. The results show that individual state-anxiety levels significantly modulate the effect of emotions on visual temporal sensitivity in ASD individuals, which was absent in our TD sample. The findings support a nuanced approach to understand the disparate sensory features in ASD individuals, by factoring in the interplay of the individual reactivity to environmental affective information and the severity of anxiety.