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Heat map: Children with autism and controls both find pictures of people looking straight at the camera more interesting than those of them looking away.
When choosing whether to look at a face or an object, children with autism generally pick the same thing controls do, according to a study published 10 April in Frontiers in Psychiatry1. The finding contradicts the widely held belief that people with autism tend not to look at faces.
Eye-tracking techniques, which follow an individual’s gaze, have shown that individuals with autism often look at peripheral details in movies and pictures, such as the background, whereas controls look at the actors’ eyes.
In the new study, researchers used an eye-tracking technique on 60 children with autism and 50 controls, matched by age, gender and cognitive ability, as they looked at pictures that contain both social and non-social images.
Each set of pictures consists of four images: two of people and two of objects. One of each pair is more interesting than other — for example, an image of a person looking at the camera versus one of a person looking away.
Overall, all the participants looked at the more interesting images more often than at the less interesting ones. They also looked more often at the objects, such as trucks, than at the faces. This unexpected result may be because the objects in the study are particularly interesting and can’t compete with still images of faces, the researchers say.
Surprisingly, there are no significant differences between the autism group and controls. For example, the children with autism looked at faces over objects 36 percent of the time compared with 38 percent for the controls.
The researchers found that the individuals who pay more attention to faces than to objects are also more accurate at identifying faces and emotions than those who look at the faces less often.
However, as expected, the children with autism performed worse overall than controls on identifying facial expressions. The participants who have the most autism traits (based on the Social Communication Questionnaire) in either group are the least skilled at face and emotion recognition.
References:
1: Parish-Morris J. et al. Front. Psychol. 4, 185 (2013) PubMed
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