The Effect of Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation of Right Anterior Superior Temporal Sulcus in Adults Related to Autism Traits

One of the principal deficit of people with ASD is an abnormal eye – gaze processing. Given the importance that having a typical eye – gaze processing plays in every aspect of people’s life, it is vital deepen this aspect.
Recent findings from various experiments revealed that autistic people tend to prefer to look the lower part of the face of other person, they look less frequent and for shorter time the eyes and have difficulties in perceiving the gaze of others (Wallace et al. 2006).
Deficits related to eye – gaze perception abnormalities are not restricted to the physiological aspect because they also involve limitation in using information from the eyes which are necessary for mentalizing (Baron-Cohen et al. 2001; Wallace et al. 2006).
Mentalizing is the fundamental process that allow the communication between people, since that through the activity of mentalizing persons are able to understand other’s mental state. There is a wide variety of cues that trigger this process and one of the most relevant is the eye – gaze perception, because it transmit core information with regard to inner states, desire, emotions and goals (Frith, 2006).
As already expressed, there is a broader autistic – spectrum into the subclinical population and depending on the extent of the presence of autistic traits, the same range of disorders can be present with various severities, one of this is the eye – gaze perception.
While there are many studies which investigated the effects of tDCS applied to the STS stimulation on empathy, there are not that have looked at the consequences in relation to the performance on tasks on eye – gaze perception and related to autism traits (Nummenma et al., 2011).
For this reason, this research is intended to test if the electrical stimulation applied to the right anterior STS have different outcomes on the performance of participants on eye – gaze perception task depending on degree of autism traits.