5. The experimental conditions (inside an MRI scanner) were perhaps less than optimal for many of the participants, especially the Autistic group, I would imagine!

Participants were presented with a selection of different (supposedly) emotional stimuli in one of two conditions: with and without a red cross superimposed between the actor’s eyes

The experimental design was more sophisticated than that suggests, but the red cross was used to encourage fixation within the region of the actor’s eyes, i.e. to force eye contact

The experimenters found that for three of the subcortical regions associated with face processing (superior colliculus, and left and right amygdalae), there was no significant difference in activation between the Autistic and control groups in ‘free viewing’

When the cross was present (‘constrained viewing’) there was a significant difference with a large effect size for these three regions

The fourth region, the pulvinar, had significantly different activation between Autistic and control groups across the board, except in constrained viewing in the ‘angry’ case

Figure 1, showing these differences: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-03378-5/figures/1

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