Atsushi Senju

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Hamamatsu University School of Medicine

UNSTRUCTURED The increasing application of Health Technology (HealthTech) in educational settings, particularly for monitoring students’ mental health, has garnered significant attention. These technologies, which range from wearable devices to digital mental health screenings, offer new opportunities for enhancing student well-being and strengthen...

Background Risk preference changes nonlinearly across development. Although extensive developmental research on the neurotypical (NTP) population has shown that risk preference is highest during adolescence, developmental changes in risk preference in autistic (AUT) people, who tend to prefer predictable behaviors, have not been investigated. Here,...

Traditional assessments of children’s health and behavioral issues primarily rely on subjective evaluation by adult raters, which imposes major costs in time and human resource to the school system. This pilot study investigates the utilization of millimeter-wave radar coupled with machine learning for the objective and semi-automatic detection and...

We demonstrate the feasibility of the radar-based measurement of body movements in scenarios involving multiple students using a pair of 79-GHz millimeter-wave radar systems with array antennas. We quantify the body motion using the Doppler frequency calculated from radar echoes. The measurement accuracy is evaluated for two experimental scenarios,...

In human interactions, gaze may be used to acquire information for goal-directed actions, to acquire information related to the interacting partner’s actions, and in the context of multimodal communication. At present, there are no models of gaze behavior in the context of vision that adequately incorporate these three components. In this study, we...

Introduction This study aimed to investigate whether there is a significant association between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of school climate, and if not, whether teacher factors are associated with the respective perceptions. Methods The participants included 1,831 students and 59 homeroom teachers from 11 public elementary and junior hig...

Background/Objectives: Autistic people employ various social strategies to form and maintain interpersonal relationships in their daily environments. These strategies can help autistic people with social interactions (leading to self-perceived efficacy of using social strategies), but can also lead to cognitive fatigue (self-perceived effort of usi...

Objective The implementation of school-based mental health screening offers promise for early detection of mental health issues in children; however, various barriers hinder its widespread adoption. This study aimed to investigate the predictive value of digital data obtained from an established daily health observation scheme in Japanese schools t...

Risk preference changes nonlinearly across development. Although extensive developmental research on the neurotypical population has shown that risk preference is highest during adolescence, developmental changes in risk preference in autistic people, who tend to prefer predictable behaviors, have not been investigated. Here, we aimed to investigat...

Many autistic people reportedly engage in camouflaging to navigate everyday social interactions; however, the function of this behavior remains largely unknown. We hypothesized that autistic people camouflage more toward neurotypical others than toward autistic others, employing it as a strategy to “fit in” within the neurotypical-majority communit...

Most autism research has been conducted in Western settings. It is not clear, however, whether autistic experiences reported in Western cultures can be translated to those of East Asian autistic people. We aimed to bridge this gap by examining the lived experiences of autistic people in Japan. We used semi-structured interviews with seven autistic...

Traditional assessments of children's health and behavioral issues primarily rely on subjective evaluation by adult raters, which imposes major costs in time and human resource to the school system. This pilot study investigates the utilization of millimeter-wave radar coupled with machine learning for the objective and semi-automatic detection and...

Objectives Motor planning is the cognitive process of planning necessary steps for achieving a purposeful movement and is specifically reflected through object manipulation. This study aimed to investigate whether fine motor skills, a surrogate of the motor planning ability of object manipulation, in early childhood are associated with later social...

Sharing experiences with others is an important part of everyday life. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) promises to simulate these experiences. However, whether IVR elicits a similar level of social presence as measured in the real world is unclear. It is also uncertain whether AI-driven virtual humans (agents) can elicit a similar level of meaningf...

Sharing experiences with others is an important part of everyday life. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) promises to simulate these experiences. However, whether IVR elicits a similar level of social presence as measured in the real world is unclear. It is also uncertain whether AI-driven virtual humans (agents) can elicit a similar level of meaningf...

As in real life, cinema viewers rely on spontaneous theory of mind (SToM) to interpret characters' mental states. Thus, analyzing cinematic structures offers a unique opportunity to examine ecologically valid sociocognitive processes. We conducted a proof-of-concept study (N = 42) to explore how SToM inferences impact film event comprehension in dr...

Purpose: Previous studies have reported that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have higher levels of loneliness than neurotypical (NTP) people, most likely because of their difficulties in social communication with their predominantly NTP peers. However, direct investigations on the causal influence of friendship on their feelings of lone...

Failure to meet early childhood developmental milestones leads to difficulty in schooling and social functioning. Evidence on the inequality in the burden of developmental delays across population groups, and identification of potential risk factors for suspected developmental delays (SDD) among younger children, are essential for designing appropr...

Aim: Little is known about early manifestations of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in females, including those who may be overlooked by the current diagnostic criteria. We longitudinally explored sex differences in the trajectories of cognitive and motor functions and adaptive behaviors in children with different levels of autistic traits. Method...

Infants adaptively modulate their social behaviours, such as gaze-following, to social context. We propose that such modulations are based on infants’ social decision-making, to achieve the most valuable outcome. We propose an ‘action value calculator model’, which formulates the cognitive mechanisms underlying, and the development of, the decision...

Background Current evidence suggests that autistic individuals are at high risk for becoming and remaining in a cycle of homelessness. Key risk factors for homelessness disproportionately affect autistic people; however, we have limited understanding of how to best support autistic individuals accessing services. This gap in the evidence base is pa...

The ability of humans to use rules for organizing action demands a high level of executive control. Situational complexity mediates rule selection, from the adoption of a given rule to the selection of complex rules to achieve an appropriate response. Several rules have been proposed to be superordinate to human behavior in a cognitive hierarchy an...

Direction of another person's eye gaze provides crucial information about their attention and intentions, which is essential for an effective social interaction. Event-related potential (ERP) measures offer precise temporal tracking of neural processes related to gaze perception. While the sensitivity of the ERP component N170 to face processing is...

Objective: Mitochondrial dysfunction has been implicated in the pathophysiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in previous studies of postmortem brain or peripheral samples. The authors investigated whether and where mitochondrial dysfunction occurs in the living brains of individuals with ASD and to identify the clinical correlates of detected...

Gaze following (GF) is fundamental to central aspects of human sociocognitive development, such as acquiring language and cultural learning. Studies have shown that infant GF is not a simple reflexive orientation to an adult's eye movement. By contrast, infants adaptively modulate GF behaviour depending on the social context. However, arguably, the...

The onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has shifted most of the world toward remote working and education. As the world continues to embrace remote virtual communication in the post-COVID-19 era, it is crucial to investigate the impacts of online social copresence on cognitive performance. The present study investigated how the online vide...

How do we understand the experiences of characters in a movie? Similar to real life, viewers attribute mental states to characters through a process known as Theory of Mind (ToM). Filmmakers commonly use Dramatic Irony, a narrative device where the audience knows something that at least one characters does not. From a social neuroscience perspectiv...

The social motivation hypothesis of autism proposes that social communication symptoms in autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) stem from atypical social attention and reward networks, where dopamine acts as a crucial mediator. However, despite evidence indicating that individuals with ASD show atypical activation in extrastriatal regions while processing...

Little is known about the trajectory patterns and sex differences in adaptive behaviors in the general population. We examined the trajectory classes of adaptive behaviors using a representative sample and examined whether the class structure and trajectory patterns differed between females and males. We further explored sex differences in neurodev...

It is unclear whether neurodevelopmental progress from infancy to early childhood remains stable. Moreover, little is known about the risk factors, if any, affecting neurodevelopmental descending transition patterns and the relationship between these patterns and later childhood adaptive behaviours. We used data of 875 children from the Hamamatsu B...

Gaze following is fundamental to human sociocognitive development, such as language and cultural learning. Previous studies have revealed that infant gaze following is not a reflexive orienting to adult’s eye movement. Instead, infants adaptively modulate gaze following behaviour depending on social contexts. However, the neurophysiological mechani...

A number of studies have reported diminished attention to the eyes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These studies predominantly used static images of faces as stimuli. Recent studies, however, have shown enhanced response to eye contact in typically developing (TD) individuals when they observe a person in a live interaction. We...

Prior studies explored the early development of memory monitoring and control. However, little work has examined cross-cultural similarities and differences in metacognitive development in early childhood. In the present research, we investigated a total of 100 Japanese and German preschool-aged children’s memory monitoring and control in a visual...

Cross-cultural psychologists have widely discussed “gaze avoidance” as a sociocultural norm to describe reduced mutual gaze in East Asians (EAs) compared to Western Caucasians (WCs). Supportive evidence is primarily based on self-reports and video recordings of face-to-face interactions, but more objective techniques that can investigate the micro-...

Other's gaze direction triggers a reflexive shift of attention known as the gaze cueing effect. Fearful facial expressions are further reported to enhance the gaze cueing effect, but it remains unclear whether this facilitative effect is specific to gaze cues or the result of more general increase in attentional resources resulting from affective a...

The emergence of cultural differences in face scanning is thought to be shaped by social experience. However, previous studies mainly investigated eye movements of adults and little is known about early development. The current study recorded eye movements of British and Japanese infants (aged 10 and 16 months) and adults, who were presented with s...

Prior studies document cross cultural variation in the developmental onset of mindreading. In particular, Japanese children are reported to pass a standard false belief task later than children from Western countries. By contrast, we know little about cross-cultural variation in young children’s metacognitive abilities. Moreover, one prominent theo...

Many studies have explored factors which influence gaze-following behavior of young infants. However, the results of empirical studies were inconsistent, and the mechanism underlying the contextual modulation of gaze following remains unclear. In order to provide valuable insight into the mechanisms underlying gaze following, we conducted computati...

Recent studies have revealed significant cultural modulations on face scanning strategies, thereby challenging the notion of universality in face perception. Current findings are based on screen-based paradigms, which offer high degrees of experimental control, but lack critical characteristics common to social interactions (e.g., social presence,...

Perception, identification, and understanding of others' actions from motion information are vital for our survival in the social world. A breakthrough in the understanding of action perception was the discovery that our visual system is sensitive to human action from the sparse motion input of only a dozen point lights, a phenomenon known as biolo...

Gaze or eye contact is one of the most important non-verbal social cues, which is fundamental to human social interactions. To achieve real time and dynamic face-to-face communication, our brain needs to process another person's gaze direction rapidly and without explicit instruction. In order to explain fast and spontaneous processing of direct ga...

Direct gaze has been shown to be a particularly important social cue, being preferentially processed even when unconsciously perceived. Results from several visual search tasks further suggest that direct gaze modulates attention, showing a faster orientation to faces perceived as looking toward us. The present study aimed to analyze putative modul...

Direct gaze has been shown to be a particularly important social cue, being preferentially processed even when unconsciously perceived. Results from several visual search tasks further suggest that direct gaze modulates attention, showing a faster orientation to faces perceived as looking toward us. The present study aimed to analyze putative modul...

A fundamental question about the development of communication behaviour in early life is how infants acquire adaptive communication behaviour that is well-suited to their individual social environment, and how the experience of parent-child communication affects this development. The current study investigated how infants develop communication skil...

A fundamental question in functional brain development is how the brain acquires specialised processing optimised for its individual environment. The current study is the first to demonstrate that distinct experience of eye gaze communication, due to the visual impairment of a parent, affects the specificity of brain responses to dynamic gaze shift...

Direct gaze is a powerful social cue signalling the attention of another person toward oneself. Here we investigated the relevance of low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequency (HSF) in facial cues for direct gaze processing. We identified two distinct peaks in the ERP response, the N170 and N240 components. These two components were re...

Despite an increasing number of studies demonstrating that young children selectively learn from others, and a few studies of children’s selective teaching, the evidence almost exclusively comes from Western cultures, and cross-cultural comparison in this line of work is very rare. In the present research, we investigated Japanese and German childr...

Toddlers with ASD show typical social orienting and positive facial expressions in response to predictable Several accounts have been proposed to explain difficulties with social interaction in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), amongst which atypical social orienting, decreased social motivation or difficulties with understanding the regularities dri...

While numerous studies have demonstrated that infants and adults preferentially orient to social stimuli, it remains unclear as to what drives such preferential orienting. It has been suggested that the learned association between social cues and subsequent reward delivery might shape such social orienting. Using a novel, spontaneous indication of...

Direct gaze is a crucial signal in human social communication, which is known to attract visual attention and modulate a wide range of behaviours. The present study investigated whether direct gaze facilitates rapid orienting to faces, which is important for adaptive on-line communication, and its neural correlates. Fifteen participants performed a...

In one hand, our team has recently shown that people modulate their metacognitive evaluations, such as their level of confidence, as a function of non-verbal information provided by other social agents (Eskenazi and al., 2015, Jacquot and al., 2015). In the other hand, cultural values are known to influence how people construe themselves and their...

Eye gaze is a key channel of non-verbal communication in humans [1, 2 and 3]. Eye contact with others is present from birth [4], and eye gaze processing is crucial for social learning and adult-infant communication [5, 6 and 7]. However, little is known about the effect of selectively different experience of eye contact and gaze communication on ea...

Eye gaze is a key channel of non-verbal communication in humans [1–3]. Eye contact with others is present from birth [4], and eye gaze processing is crucial for social learning and adult-infant communication [5–7]. However, little is known about the effect of selectively different experience of eye contact and gaze communication on early social and...

Direct gaze is a powerful social cue used to indicate the attention of another on oneself and is of such importance to typical everyday social interaction that it is preferentially attended from birth (Farroni et al., 2002). Previous research has indicated better face encoding and retrieval of faces displaying direct as opposed to averted gaze with...

Johnson and Morton (1991) used Gabriel Horn's work on the filial imprinting model to inspire a two-process theory of the development of face processing in humans. In this paper we review evidence accrued over the past two decades from infants and adults, and from other primates, that informs this two-process model. While work with newborns and infa...

Eye contact plays an essential role in social interaction. Atypical eye contact is a diagnostic and widely reported feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we determined whether altered unconscious visual processing of eye contact might underlie atypical eye contact in ASD. Using continuous flash suppression (CFS), we found that typically...

The recent development in the measurements of spontaneous mental state understanding, employing eye-movements instead of verbal responses, has opened new opportunities for understanding the developmental origin of "mind-reading" impairments frequently described in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Our main aim was to characterize the relationship b...

Previous research has demonstrated that the way human adults look at others' faces is modulated by their cultural background, but very little is known about how such a culture-specific pattern of face gaze develops. The current study investigated the role of cultural background on the development of face scanning in young children between the ages...

The Supplementary Material contains additional analyses on the effect of the duration of the experiment, as well as the analyses of eye-tracking data.

The effects of selectively different experience of eye contact and gaze behaviour on the early development of five sighted infants of blind parents were investigated. Infants were assessed longitudinally at 6-10, 12-15 and 24-47 months. Face scanning and gaze following were assessed using eye tracking. In addition, established measures of autistic-...

To investigate whether facial expression processing in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is based on local information of the stimuli, we prepared low spatial frequency (LSF) images with blurred facial features and high spatial frequency (HSF) images with rich facial features from broad (normal) spatial frequency (BSF) images. Eighteen c...

Eye contact has a fundamental role in human social interaction. The special appearance of the human eye (i.e., white sclera contrasted with a coloured iris) implies the importance of detecting another person's face through eye contact. Empirical studies have demonstrated that faces making eye contact are detected quickly and processed preferentiall...

The current study investigated the role of cultural norms on the development of face-scanning. British and Japanese adults' eye movements were recorded while they observed avatar faces moving their mouth, and then their eyes toward or away from the participants. British participants fixated more on the mouth, which contrasts with Japanese participa...

Infants’ visual scanning of social scenes is influenced by both exogenously and endogenously driven shifts of attention. We manipulate these factors by contrasting individual infants’ distribution of visual attention to the eyes relative to the mouth when viewing complex dynamic scenes with multiple communicative signals (e.g. peek-a-boo), relative...

Most previous studies suggest diminished susceptibility to contagious yawning in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it could be driven by their atypical attention to the face. To test this hypothesis, children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children were shown yawning and control movies. To ensure participants' attention...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have profound impairment in the development of social interaction and communication. However, it is also known that some 'high-functioning' individuals with ASD show apparently typical capacity to process social information in a controlled experimental settings, despite their difficulties in daily li...

Identifying genotype/phenotype relations in human social cognition has been enhanced by the study of Williams syndrome (WS). Indeed, individuals with WS present with a particularly strong social drive, and researchers have sought to link deleted genes in the WS critical region (WSCR) of chromosome 7q11.23 to this unusual social profile. In this pap...

Whilst joint attention (JA) impairments in autism have been widely studied, little is known about the early development of gaze following, a precursor to establishing JA. We employed eye-tracking to record gaze following longitudinally in infants with and without a family history of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at 7 and 13 months. No group differ...

The current study tested whether the purely amodal cue of contingency elicits orientation following behavior in 8-month-old infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with automated objects without human features that did or did not react contingently to the infants' fixations recorded by an eye tracker. We found that an object's occasional orientat...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are reported to have difficulty in learning novel word–object associations in case of discrepancy between objects in the speaker's focus and their focus (the discrepant condition). Two eye-tracking experiments investigated this difficulty by controlling and recording children's gaze fixation. In Experime...

Atypical development of face processing is a major characteristic in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which could be due to atypical interactions between subcortical and cortical face processing. The current study investigated the saccade planning towards faces in ASD. Seventeen children with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) children observed a...

In the research reported here, we investigated whether 18-month-olds would use their own past experience of visual access to attribute perception and consequent beliefs to other people. Infants in this study wore either opaque blindfolds (opaque condition) or trick blindfolds that looked opaque but were actually transparent (trick condition). Then...

Theory of mind, the cognitive capacity to infer others' mental states, is crucial for the development of social communication. The impairment of theory of mind may relate to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which is characterized by profound difficulties in social interaction and communication. In the current article, I summarize recent updates in t...

Background: Recent studies suggest that children with ASD are less susceptible to contagious yawning than typically developing children (Senju et al. 2007; Giganti et al. 2009; Helt et al. 2010). Since Provine (1989) reported that yawning eyes are stronger releaser of yawn contagion than yawning mouth, it is possible that the diminished susceptibil...