Eye movement and visual search: are there elementary abnormalities in autism?

Fullana et al. (2007) looked at every paper they could find on eye movements in autism. They wanted to know if tiny eye-muscle quirks could snowball into the social and communication gaps we see in ASD. The review pulled in lab studies, brain scans, and face-viewing tasks, but did not run new experiments.

The team found almost no direct tests of basic eye-muscle control in autism. Still, they argued that small oculomotor glitches might be the first brick to fall, leading to missed faces, missed words, and then full social delays. They called for eye-tracking tools that could catch these early bricks before the wall crumbles.

Later work backs the idea that eye hardware matters. Kovarski et al. (2019) clocked kids with ASD moving their eyes faster, yet they bungled visual search, showing speed alone is not a gift. Lemons et al. (2015) found the opposite pattern: high-functioning children moved their eyes more slowly and lagged when tracking moving targets. The two studies seem to clash, but they tested different age bands and tasks—fast saccades versus slow pursuit—so both can be true.

Ma et al. (2021) pooled 140 eye-tracking papers and confirmed that people with ASD look less at eyes across cultures and ages, giving a sturdy floor under the early review’s hunch. Higgins et al. (2021) added a warning: every lab uses its own pictures, timings, and rules, so a shared protocol is needed before eye-tracking can graduate from research toy to screener.

Wallace et al. (2008) offers hope: school-age kids with ASD can catch up on reading eye direction, hinting that early oculomotor gaps may close if we support them at the right moment.

You can add quick eye checks to your intake. Watch if the child moves eyes too fast, too slow, or skips faces. Share the clip with the team to pick targets—maybe smooth-pursuit drills or face-gaze games—before social lessons start. The goal is to fix the hardware so the social software can run.