# Eye tracking demonstrates the influence of autistic traits on social attention in a community sample from India

## TL;DR

This study shows that autistic traits are linked to reduced social attention in Indian adults, similar to findings in Western populations.

## Contribution

The study demonstrates the cultural generalizability of social attention patterns linked to autism in an Indian sample.

## Key findings

- Higher autistic traits were associated with reduced preference for social stimuli in Indian participants.
- The association was driven by social traits, not attention to detail traits of autism.
- No significant link was found between ADHD traits and social attention.

## Abstract

The ability to attend to social stimuli is fundamental for processing social cues and shaping social behavior, yet cultural variability in this capacity remains relatively unexplored. Social attention is typically tested using preferential-looking paradigms in labs, which have demonstrated that autistic individuals attend less to social stimuli. Such studies are limited, by the fact that they have almost all been conducted in Western Europe and the USA. To address this gap, our objective was to test the cultural generalizability of these results by investigating whether autistic symptoms are negatively associated with social attention in a traditionally understudied sample: Indian adults. Additionally, we tested the specificity of this relation by investigating whether a similar association exists with the traits of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Our study involved 121 young adults from Kerala, India. Autistic and ADHD traits were evaluated using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS), respectively. The participants’ gaze behavior was recorded during a preferential-looking task, where pairs of social and non-social images were presented simultaneously. Individuals with higher autistic traits exhibited a reduced preference for social stimuli. No such association of social attention was noted with ADHD traits. Follow-up analysis of AQ subscales indicated that the association between gaze duration and autistic traits was driven by the social, and not the attention to detail factor of autistic traits. Our results provide new evidence for the cultural generalizability of the social attention task and offer the potential for culture-agnostic phenotypic assessments for adults with autism.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-23676-7.