Social attention and autism symptoms in high functioning women with autism spectrum disorders.
High-functioning women with autism show shorter face gaze that tracks their social symptom severity, so watch eye duration, not mouth fixation.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tracked eye movements of high-functioning women with autism and matched controls. Each woman looked at photos of faces while a camera recorded where her eyes landed.
The goal was simple: see if women with autism look at eyes, mouths, and whole faces less than typical women. They also checked whether shorter face gaze lined up with higher autism trait scores.
What they found
Women with autism spent less time looking at faces, eyes, and mouths. The shorter the gaze, the higher their autism symptom score on the SRS.
In plain words, reduced face watching tracked real-life social difficulty in this group.
How this fits with other research
Harrop et al. (2018) seems to disagree. They found autistic girls kept typical face-looking while autistic boys did not. The key difference is age: Clare studied young kids; P et al. studied grown women. Early childhood may mask the gap that shows up by adulthood.
Schaaf et al. (2015) used brain waves and saw dampened early face responses only in autistic girls, linking those brain scores to social symptoms. P et al. now shows the same link with actual eye gaze in women, bridging brain and behavior.
Shic et al. (2023) ran a quick five-minute eye task with school-age kids and also found less face gaze tied to mannerism scores. The pattern holds from childhood to adulthood, so a short gaze check can flag risk across ages.
Why it matters
If you assess autistic women or girls, do not expect mouth hyper-focus; expect shorter looks at the whole face. A one-minute eye-tracking clip or even careful live observation can give you a cheap, non-verbal marker of social symptom load. When gaze is brief, target social attention first in your intervention plan.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Research has suggested a different, less visible, clinical manifestation of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in females. There is, however, limited research into possible underlying mechanisms explaining the female phenotype. AIMS: This study investigates social attention in females with ASD. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: 26 women diagnosed with ASD and 26 typical female controls were shown three video clips containing intense emotions. Social attention was assessed by measuring eye fixation patterns during the video clips. Autism symptoms were assessed using the informant reported Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS). OUTCOME AND RESULTS: Results show normal time to first fixation to the face, but lower fixation duration to the face in women with ASD. Analyzing the visual patterns further, there were similar impairments in fixation to mouth, eyes and other facial areas. Relating social attention to autism symptoms revealed several significant correlations within the ASD group. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Women with ASD show abnormalities in social attention and these abnormalities are related to level of autism symptoms. In contrast to other studies which investigate male dominated ASD samples, a hyperfocus to the mouth area could not be found.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2017 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2017.03.005