Brief Report: Differences in Naturalistic Attention to Real-World Scenes in Adolescents with 16p.11.2 Deletion.

The team watched how teens with a 16p11.2 gene deletion look around virtual rooms.

They used eye-tracking goggles while each teen explored 3-D scenes on a screen.

A comparison group of typically developing teens did the same thing.

The deletion group let bright colors and movement guide their eyes.

They spent less time looking at items that made sense for the scene, like a toothbrush in a bathroom.

Their gaze followed bottom-up salience, not top-down meaning.

Hochhauser et al. (2018) saw the opposite in ASD teens: those kids spotted scene changes faster than typical peers. The new data say 16p11.2 teens do not show that speed edge, so the "ASD visual superpower" idea does not apply to this genetic subtype.

Hou et al. (2024) also found wandering, less-social gaze in younger autistic children. Together the studies trace a line: altered scene priors start in childhood and stay through adolescence in both ASD and 16p11.2 groups.

Baharav et al. (2008) showed autistic adults miss big, odd changes because they ignore scene schemas. The 16p11.2 teens echo this pattern, hinting that weak top-down guidance sits in both conditions.

If you teach a teen with 16p11.2 deletion, highlight the key item with motion, color, or a spotlight. Do not assume they will pick the important part just because it "makes sense" in the setting. Pair the salient cue with language so meaning can catch up to the flash.