Do faces capture the attention of individuals with Williams syndrome or autism? Evidence from tracking eye movements.

Cramm et al. (2009) watched where people looked while pictures of faces popped up on a screen. They tested three groups: kids and adults with autism, people with Williams syndrome, and typically developing controls. An eye-tracking camera recorded every glance.

Each person saw 32 trials. A face appeared on one side and a toy or noise-making object on the other. The team measured how long eyes stayed on the face versus the object.

People with Williams syndrome stared at faces about 500 ms longer than controls. People with autism looked away faster; their face gaze was roughly 300 ms shorter than controls.

The difference held for both kids and adults, showing the pattern is stable across age.

McCarron et al. (2013) repeated the reduced-face-gaze finding in autism, but only when faces sat inside busy social scenes. Isolated faces did not trigger the difference, so real-world context matters when you test.

Harrop et al. (2018) adds sex to the story. ASD boys showed the short-face-look pattern; ASD girls looked at faces like typical girls. If you screen girls using male norms you may miss them.

Spriggs et al. (2015) tracked babies who later got an ASD diagnosis. Eye interest started typical, then dropped and never bounced back. The short-face-gaze pattern in Cramm et al. (2009) is the end point of that downhill path.

Eye-tracking gives you a cheap, two-minute probe of social attention. Use it during intake to see if the client looks less at faces than same-age peers. Pair the data with sex-specific norms so you do not under-flag girls. If face gaze is low, build interventions that explicitly reward longer and more accurate face looking during natural tasks like conversation or play.