Social attention in ASD: A review and meta-analysis of eye-tracking studies.
Expect smaller social-attention gaps with single faces and bigger gaps with crowds in eye-tracking tests.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team pooled 38 eye-tracking papers that compared people with autism to typically-developing peers.
They asked: who looks less at faces, eyes, and people in pictures or videos?
Every study used the same kind of camera that watches where the eyes land.
What they found
Across all papers, the autism group spent less time looking at social things.
The gap got bigger when the picture or video showed two or more people together.
A medium effect size of 0.55 tells you the difference is real, not tiny.
How this fits with other research
Chevallier et al. (2013) saw the same drop in social looking, but they also found that direct eye-gaze still pulls attention in autism.
Kikuchi et al. (2022) seem to disagree: live eye contact made autistic teens show normal heart-rate slowing. The clash fades when you see the meta used photos while Yukiko used a real person in the room.
Flanagan et al. (2015) also look contradictory: kids with autism could shift attention to social cues when mental age was matched. The key is task type—endogenous cueing versus free viewing.
Doak et al. (2019) extend the idea: they tracked eye gaze during PRT therapy and showed social looking can improve as language grows.
Why it matters
When you run an eye-tracking test, pick stimuli that match your goal. Use single faces to spot small gains and group scenes to show big deficits. If the child looks fine during live play, try photo or video tasks before you rule out social attention issues. Track change over time—some kids will move their eyes more as language and play skills grow.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Determining whether social attention is reduced in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and what factors influence social attention is important to our theoretical understanding of developmental trajectories of ASD and to designing targeted interventions for ASD. This meta-analysis examines data from 38 articles that used eye-tracking methods to compare individuals with ASD and TD controls. In this paper, the impact of eight factors on the size of the effect for the difference in social attention between these two groups are evaluated: age, non-verbal IQ matching, verbal IQ matching, motion, social content, ecological validity, audio input and attention bids. Results show that individuals with ASD spend less time attending to social stimuli than typically developing (TD) controls, with a mean effect size of 0.55. Social attention in ASD was most impacted when stimuli had a high social content (showed more than one person). This meta-analysis provides an opportunity to survey the eye-tracking research on social attention in ASD and to outline potential future research directions, more specifically research of social attention in the context of stimuli with high social content.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2015.10.011