Cognitive perspective-taking during scene perception in autism spectrum disorder: evidence from eye movements.
Adults with autism can follow a thief's gaze but not a repairman's, so flag the fix-it perspective during vocational training.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hsieh et al. (2014) watched where adults with autism looked while they viewed photos.
Each photo showed a room and two people: a burglar or a repairman.
The team asked, "Do viewers look at the items each person cares about?"
What they found
Typical adults quickly looked at jewels when the burglar was present.
They also looked at broken items when the repairman was present.
Adults with autism only followed the burglar cue; they ignored the repairman cue.
How this fits with other research
Armstrong et al. (2014) ran a similar lab task the same year and also saw slow, uneven perspective-taking in adults with ASD.
Schuwerk et al. (2015) seemed to disagree: they showed that a quick peek at the right outcome improved eye-movement Theory-of-Mind in adults with ASD.
The gap is about task type. K used open-ended scene viewing; Tobias used a brief false-belief demo with feedback.
Peters et al. (2018) pull the threads together in a review: teach perspective-taking inside real social routines, not as stand-alone drills.
Why it matters
Your client may look at a photo or video and still miss the repairman's point of view.
Add a clear prompt or quick model that shows what the fixer needs to notice.
Then practice the skill in a real chore or job task so the learning transfers.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The present study examined how eye movements during scene viewing are modulated by adopting psychological perspectives in both adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically developing adults. In the current study, participants viewed house scenes with either non-perspective-taking (look for valuable items/features of the house that need fixing) or perspective-taking instructions (imagine that you are a burglar/repairman) while their eye movements were recorded. The eye movement measures revealed that for the "look for the valuable items" and burglar perspective task, the ASD group showed typical relevance effects (the preference to look at schema-relevant compared with schema-irrelevant targets) in their eye movements. However, we found subtle processing differences between the groups that were related to initial orienting to and processing of schema-relevant items for the "look for the features that need fixing" and the repairman perspective-taking task. There was an absence of a relevance effect for the ASD group for the repairman perspective and its non-perspective-taking equivalent instruction showing that the identification of items relevant to those schemas was more difficult for the ASD group. The present findings suggest that resolving ambiguity may be a defining feature of complex information processing deficits in ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2014 · doi:10.1002/aur.1352