Abstract
<p>Background. Psychosis, social anxiety, and autism are clinical constructs that share important phenotypic features, particularly social dysfunction. A critical determinant of social functioning is an individual’s ability to recognize when social cues, like eye gaze, are meant for them. Emerging computational modeling data in psychosis suggest that altered perception of gaze direction stems from deficits in evidence accumulation – the process of gathering and integrating information – when processing social cues. Here, we investigated whether aberrant evidence accumulation during eye gaze processing are associated with social functioning or, as a secondary aim, with other measures of psychopathology, in a transdiagnostic sample enriched for psychotic, socially anxious, or autistic characteristics.Methods. We examined gaze perception in a sample of 111 adolescents and young adults (ages 14-30) with varying levels of social dysfunction and enriched for psychosis proneness, social anxiety, and autistic traits. We used drift diffusion models (DDM) to characterize key processes driving perceptual judgements in a self-directed gaze discrimination task, including the efficiency of evidence accumulation. We tested whether evidence accumulation was associated with social functioning, social cognition, and these different psychopathology dimensions.Results. Impaired evidence accumulation during gaze processing showed strong associations with impaired social cognition and modest associations with diminished social functioning and elevated psychosis and social anxiety symptoms. However, evidence accumulation sensitivity was not associated with autism traits.Conclusions. Evidence accumulation for subtle social cues relates to social cognition—a key determinant of social functioning. It may also be relevant to real-world social functioning and multiple psychopathology dimensions, including psychosis and social anxiety. Therefore, evidence accumulation should be investigated as a mechanism supporting social difficulties and related psychopathology.</p>