Eye tracking demonstrates the influence of autistic traits on social attention in a community sample from India
In Indian young adults, more autism traits equal less eye gaze to social pictures—same trend seen worldwide.
01Research in Context
What this study did
KAgiovlasitis et al. (2025) asked 100 Indian college students to look at pictures while a small camera tracked their eyes.
The pictures showed either people (social) or objects (non-social).
Each student also filled out two short forms: one for autism traits, one for ADHD traits.
What they found
Students who scored high on autism traits looked at the social pictures less than peers with low scores.
ADHD trait scores did not change looking time to either picture type.
The link stayed small but clear after age, sex, and education were held constant.
How this fits with other research
Vabalas et al. (2016) saw the same pattern during real face-to-face chats in Western students, showing the trait-attention link crosses cultures and settings.
Spanoudis et al. (2011) and Cramm et al. (2009) already found shorter face gaze in adults diagnosed with autism; KS et al. now prove you do not need a diagnosis to see the drift.
Harrop et al. (2018) muddied the waters: autistic girls kept typical face looking while autistic boys looked away. KS pooled both sexes, so their small overall effect hides the girl-boy gap.
Why it matters
If a client avoids eye contact, check trait level before labeling it "autistic behavior."
Use brief eye-tracking games during intake; lower social looking can guide you to social-skills targets even without a formal ASD label.
Remember sex can mask the pattern—girls may pass the gaze test yet still need support.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a 30-second picture-view task to your intake and note where the client’s eyes go—low social looking flags trait-related social goals.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The ability to attend to social stimuli is fundamental for processing social cues and shaping social behavior, yet cultural variability in this capacity remains relatively unexplored. Social attention is typically tested using preferential-looking paradigms in labs, which have demonstrated that autistic individuals attend less to social stimuli. Such studies are limited, by the fact that they have almost all been conducted in Western Europe and the USA. To address this gap, our objective was to test the cultural generalizability of these results by investigating whether autistic symptoms are negatively associated with social attention in a traditionally understudied sample: Indian adults. Additionally, we tested the specificity of this relation by investigating whether a similar association exists with the traits of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Our study involved 121 young adults from Kerala, India. Autistic and ADHD traits were evaluated using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS), respectively. The participants' gaze behavior was recorded during a preferential-looking task, where pairs of social and non-social images were presented simultaneously. Individuals with higher autistic traits exhibited a reduced preference for social stimuli. No such association of social attention was noted with ADHD traits. Follow-up analysis of AQ subscales indicated that the association between gaze duration and autistic traits was driven by the social, and not the attention to detail factor of autistic traits. Our results provide new evidence for the cultural generalizability of the social attention task and offer the potential for culture-agnostic phenotypic assessments for adults with autism.
, 2025 · doi:10.1038/s41598-025-23676-7