Stage-Specific Animate Attention Bias in Individuals with High and Low Autistic Traits: Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Evidence

Animate attention bias reflects the visual system’s tendency to prioritize animate over inanimate stimuli. This bias is reduced in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), suggesting that similar patterns may also be observed in individuals with high autistic traits (AT). Although previous research has reported reduced animate attention bias during early attentional orienting in individuals with high AT, how this bias unfolds across processing stages remains unclear. Using a dot-probe task combined with eye-tracking, the present study examined this stage-related pattern in individuals with high and low AT. Response time results showed that the low AT group had a significant animate-probe advantage, whereas the high AT group showed no significant advantage, broadly replicating prior findings. In stage-wise analyses, the low AT group showed a significant animate-probe advantage at the late stage, whereas the high AT group showed no significant advantage at either stage. However, this group difference was not reflected in most fixation-based measures. This RT–fixation dissociation suggests that reduced animate attention bias in high AT should not be interpreted simply as reduced overt fixation allocation to animate stimuli, but may reflect differences in using animacy-related cue-location information to facilitate subsequent probe detection and response selection.