Looking at movies and cartoons: eye-tracking evidence from Williams syndrome and autism.
Short video clips reveal that autism cuts face-looking time while Williams syndrome boosts it, but only with real humans, not cartoons.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Casey et al. (2009) tracked where kids looked while they watched short movies and cartoons. They compared three groups: children with autism, children with Williams syndrome, and typically developing peers. Each child sat in front of a screen while a small camera recorded their eye movements. The clips showed both real human faces and cartoon faces.
The team wanted to see if the two diagnoses changed how much time kids spent looking at faces versus other parts of the scene.
What they found
Kids with autism looked at faces less than typical kids in both movies and cartoons. Kids with Williams syndrome did the opposite: they looked at faces longer than typical kids, but only when real people were on screen. The extra face-looking in Williams syndrome disappeared during cartoons.
The results were mixed: autism lowered face gaze across both types of videos, while Williams syndrome raised it only for human movies.
How this fits with other research
Cramm et al. (2009) ran almost the same study in the same year and got the same pattern, making this a direct replication. The two papers strengthen each other because they used the same groups and method.
van der Geest et al. (2002) seems to disagree: they found no autism–typical difference when kids viewed still cartoon people. The clash disappears when you notice N used static pictures while D used moving videos. Motion appears to bring out the autism face-gaze deficit.
McCarron et al. (2013) complicates the Williams story. In a mental-state task, adults with Williams syndrome actually looked at faces less, not more. The takeaway: prolonged face gaze in Williams syndrome is not guaranteed; it depends on the task and the person.
Why it matters
When you assess social attention, pick your stimuli carefully. Static photos may miss the gaze differences that show up in dynamic videos. For autism, expect shorter face-looking in both cartoons and real-life clips. For Williams syndrome, watch for longer face-looking in human videos, but check each child because the pattern can flip under different tasks. Use short movie clips during intake to get a clearer picture of where your client actually looks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Autism and Williams syndrome (WS) are neuro-developmental disorders associated with distinct social phenotypes. While individuals with autism show a lack of interest in socially important cues, individuals with WS often show increased interest in socially relevant information. METHODS: The current eye-tracking study explores how individuals with WS and autism preferentially attend to social scenes and movie extracts containing human actors and cartoon characters. The proportion of gaze time spent fixating on faces, bodies and the scene background was investigated. RESULTS: While individuals with autism preferentially attended to characters' faces for less time than was typical, individuals with WS attended to the same regions for longer than typical. For individuals with autism atypical gaze behaviours extended across human actor and cartoon images or movies but for WS atypicalities were restricted to human actors. CONCLUSIONS: The reported gaze behaviours provide experimental evidence of the divergent social interests associated with autism and WS.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2009 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2008.01142.x