Autistic adults exhibit typical sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance.
Autistic adults read personal-space shifts as well as anyone, so coaching can jump straight to social rules, not perceptual drills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bunce et al. (2024) asked autistic and non-autistic adults to notice when a person on screen moved closer or farther away.
The team used short video clips and pressed-for-time judgments.
They also gave everyone a quick face-recognition test to double-check the usual face-memory gap.
What they found
Both groups spotted distance changes equally fast and accurately.
Face recognition was still weaker in the autistic adults, so the trouble is not across-the-board social seeing.
How this fits with other research
Uono et al. (2021) saw the same null result: autistic adults detected eye contact just fine.
Oomen et al. (2023) and Van der Donck et al. (2023) add brain data—EEG showed normal early responses to social scenes and to facial identity.
Hartston et al. (2023) looks like a clash: they found poorer face recognition in the same adult population. The gap closes when you see the tasks tap different skills—spatial proximity versus storing face details.
Why it matters
When an adult client stands too close or too far, do not assume they cannot sense the gap.
Teach flexible rules (“arm’s-length in the office, closer with friends”) instead of drilling basic distance detection.
Save face-memory training for situations that really need it, like learning new co-workers’ names.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The visual processing differences seen in autism often impede individuals' visual perception of the social world. In particular, many autistic people exhibit poor face recognition. Here, we sought to determine whether autistic adults also show impaired perception of dyadic social interactions-a class of stimulus thought to engage face-like visual processing. Our focus was the perception of interpersonal distance. Participants completed distance change detection tasks, in which they had to make perceptual decisions about the distance between two actors. On half of the trials, participants judged whether the actors moved closer together; on the other half, whether they moved further apart. In a nonsocial control task, participants made similar judgments about two grandfather clocks. We also assessed participants' face recognition ability using standardized measures. The autistic and nonautistic observers showed similar levels of perceptual sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance when viewing social interactions. As expected, however, the autistic observers showed clear signs of impaired face recognition. Despite putative similarities between the visual processing of faces and dyadic social interactions, our results suggest that these two facets of social vision may dissociate.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1002/aur.3164