Eye contact perception in high-functioning adults with autism spectrum disorder.
Autistic adults sense eye contact accurately but skip the usual favoritism toward similar faces.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Uono et al. (2021) asked adults with and without autism to judge when a person on a screen was looking at them.
The task was simple: press a button when you feel eye contact. No extra training or rewards were given.
All volunteers were high-functioning, so any differences would show up in subtle social judgments, not basic vision.
What they found
Both groups hit the button at the same time. Autistic adults sensed eye contact just as well as neurotypical adults.
Only the neurotypical group showed an ingroup bias: they were quicker when the face looked like "their" group.
The autism group treated every face the same, missing the usual social shortcut of favoring similar people.
How this fits with other research
Bunce et al. (2024) later found the same null result with personal space: autistic adults detected distance shifts on par with peers. Together the studies push the idea that raw social sensing, not accuracy, is intact.
Older work looked less hopeful. Muth et al. (2014) showed that autistic kids fail to use eye contact as a cue to follow someone else’s gaze. Shota’s adults could detect the gaze, but they didn’t use it socially—no contradiction, just a different step in the chain.
Likewise, Akechi et al. (2014) saw teens with autism miss the automatic pop-out of direct gaze. Shota’s adults did notice the gaze, suggesting earlier gaps may fade with age or task type.
Why it matters
For BCBAs this means don’t assume a client “can’t see” eye contact. If they look away, the issue is likely comfort or social use, not detection. Build lessons that explicitly teach why and when to use eye contact, and skip drills that only test if they notice it.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Start sessions by asking the client to signal when you are looking at them—then discuss how they want to respond, not just whether they noticed.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The detection of a self-directed gaze is often the starting point for social interactions and a person who feels as if they are being watched can prepare to respond to others' actions irrespective of the real gaze direction because the other person may likely be motivated to approach. Although many studies demonstrated that individuals with autism spectrum disorder have difficulty discriminating gaze direction, it remains unclear how the perception of self-directed gaze by individuals with autism spectrum disorder differs from that of age-, sex-, and IQ-matched typically developing individuals. Participants observed faces with various gaze directions and answered whether the person in the photograph was looking at them or not. Individuals with and without autism spectrum disorder were just as likely to perceive subtle averted gazes as self-directed gazes. The frequency of perceiving a self-directed gaze decreased as gaze aversion increased in both groups and, in general, individuals with autism spectrum disorder showed a comparable ability to perceive a self-directed gaze as that of typically developing individuals. Interestingly, considering face membership of photographs (ingroup or outgroup faces), typically developing individuals, but not individuals with autism spectrum disorder, were more likely to perceive self-directed gazes from ingroup faces than from outgroup faces. However, individuals with autism spectrum disorder had different affective experiences in response to ingroup and outgroup faces. These results suggest that individuals with autism spectrum disorder did not show an ingroup bias for the perception of a self-directed gaze, and raise a possibility that an atypical emotional experience contributes to the diminished ingroup bias.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2021 · doi:10.1177/1362361320949721