Children with autism observe social interactions in an idiosyncratic manner.
Measure gaze idiosyncrasy—not just face looking—to boost ASD identification accuracy and track symptom change.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team showed short movies of kids talking and playing to the children. Half had autism, half were typically developing.
An eye tracker recorded every glance. Instead of counting "face time," the authors built an idiosyncrasy score. It captures how oddly each child moved their eyes around the scene.
The goal: see if this new score spots autism better than old face-gaze rules and if it tracks symptom severity.
What they found
The autism group earned much higher idiosyncrasy scores. Their scan paths were all over the map—some stared at hands, others at backgrounds.
The new score correctly flagged 84 % of kids, beating the classic "percent looking at faces" metric. Higher oddity also lined up with higher ADOS scores.
How this fits with other research
Zhao et al. (2023) watched Chinese kids in live chats and also saw less mouth and face gaze. Together the papers show reduced social looking across cultures and settings.
Lemons et al. (2015) found no pupil stress when preschoolers with autism met eyes. That seems opposite, but they studied tiny tots and measured arousal, not scan paths. Age and method differences likely explain the gap.
Finke et al. (2017) added that high-trait individuals look away more during real conversations. Inbar’s filmed scenes and H’s live talks both reveal quirky gaze once interaction pressure rises.
Why it matters
Stop relying only on "looks at face" checklists. Track where the child looks across the whole scene and how unusual that pattern is. A quick idiosyncrasy index can boost early screening and give you a number that moves with symptom change, helping you judge if your social-skills intervention is working.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Run a 30-second video of peers playing, record eye paths with free software, and note any kid whose scan pattern strays far from the group norm.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Previous eye-tracking studies have reported that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) fixate less on faces in comparison to controls. To properly understand social interactions, however, children must gaze not only at faces but also at actions, gestures, body movements, contextual details, and objects, thereby creating specific gaze patterns when observing specific social interactions. We presented three different movies with social interactions to 111 children (71 with ASD) who watched each of the movies twice. Typically developing children viewed the movies in a remarkably predictable and reproducible manner, exhibiting gaze patterns that were similar to the mean gaze pattern of other controls, with strong correlations across individuals (intersubject correlations) and across movie presentations (intra-subject correlations). In contrast, children with ASD exhibited significantly more variable/idiosyncratic gaze patterns that differed from the mean gaze pattern of controls and were weakly correlated across individuals and presentations. Most importantly, quantification of gaze idiosyncrasy in individual children enabled separation of ASD and control children with higher sensitivity and specificity than traditional measures such as time gazing at faces. Individual magnitudes of gaze idiosyncrasy were also significantly correlated with ASD severity and cognitive scores and were significantly correlated across movies and movie presentations, demonstrating clinical sensitivity and reliability. These results suggest that gaze idiosyncrasy is a potent behavioral abnormality that characterizes a considerable number of children with ASD and may contribute to their impaired development. Quantification of gaze idiosyncrasy in individual children may aid in assessing symptom severity and their change in response to treatments. Autism Res 2020, 13: 935-946. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Typically, developing children watch movies of social interactions in a reliable and predictable manner, attending faces, gestures, actions, body movements, and objects that are relevant to the social interaction and its narrative. Here, we demonstrate that children with ASD watch such movies with significantly more variable/idiosyncratic gaze patterns that differ across individuals and across movie presentations. We demonstrate that quantifying this gaze variability may aid in identifying children with ASD and in determining the severity of their symptoms.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2020 · doi:10.1002/aur.2234