[4T1-OS-6c] OS-6

[4T1-OS-6c-02] Sensory processing in autism spectrum disorder versus typical development assessed using a utility function for fried egg texture in latent space

〇Shunsuke Fujii¹, Yukiya Taki¹, Haruto Yoshida¹, Natsuki Nishikawa², Masashi Komori³, Kazuhiro Ueda⁴, Kunihito Kato¹, Takeshi Hara¹, Hirokazu Kumazaki², Kazunori Terada¹ (1. Gifu University, 2. Nagasaki University, 3. Osaka Electro-Communication University, 4. The University of Tokyo)

Keywords:Autism Spectrum Disorders, Gaussian process regression, Utility function

Autism spectrum disorder patients are more likely to have problems with picky eating than their typically developing peers of the same age.Because ASD individuals have a higher ability to discriminate visual details and patterns and a higher sensitivity to specific visual patterns and objects than TD individuals, visual food preferences may predict picky eating.In this study, we investigated the differences in visual food preferences between ASD and TD by identifying utility functions on the multidimensional visual feature space comprising food appearance for fried eggs.Participants in the ASD group (n=11) and the TD group (n=10) rated their likelihood of eating fried eggs by viewing images of fried eggs generated from the latent space comprising the appearance of fried eggs, which was learned using StyleGAN2.The results of the experiment indicated that there may be no significant difference in the visual features that contribute to the preference for fried eggs between ASD and TD.However, it is possible that the latent feature space we used was not sufficient to represent the visual preferences, and therefore, more precise identification of the utility function through untangling may clarify the differences in visual food preferences between ASD and TD.