Eye movement difficulties in autism spectrum disorder: implications for implicit contextual learning.
Kids with autism need more time to start looking and to leave each look, but brief color cues still reach them fast.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Dimitropoulos et al. (2013) watched the eyes of kids with autism during a picture search.
They timed how long it took the kids to move their eyes and how long each look lasted.
The task was to find a target hidden in a busy scene, like Where’s Waldo on a screen.
What they found
Kids with autism waited longer before the first eye jump.
Once they landed on a spot, they stayed there longer than typical kids.
The delay was in time, not in where they looked — they saw the right places, just more slowly.
How this fits with other research
Guy et al. (2014) saw the same slow-start pattern, but accuracy dropped when the pictures showed angry or scary faces.
Iarocci et al. (2014) tested older and younger kids and found no “autism super-search” gift — speed improved with age for everyone.
Kopec et al. (2020) flipped the timing: when targets flashed for only 39–65 ms, kids with autism actually beat typical peers at spotting color features.
Together the papers show: autism can slow the first move and lengthen each look, yet quick flashes can still be caught well.
Why it matters
Give extra wait time after you point to a new item on the table or screen.
Use brief, color-coded cues to grab attention — they work even when kids are slow to start looking.
These small timing tweaks cut frustration and boost learning in table-top and natural-environment sessions.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a two-second pause after you give a “look” prompt before you prompt again — and use bright color targets when you need quick attention.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
It is widely accepted that we use contextual information to guide our gaze when searching for an object. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) also utilise contextual information in this way; yet, their visual search in tasks of this kind is much slower compared with people without ASD. The aim of the current study was to explore the reason for this by measuring eye movements. Eye movement analyses revealed that the slowing of visual search was not caused by making a greater number of fixations. Instead, participants in the ASD group were slower to launch their first saccade, and the duration of their fixations was longer. These results indicate that slowed search in ASD in contextual learning tasks is not due to differences in the spatial allocation of attention but due to temporal delays in the initial-reflexive orienting of attention and subsequent-focused attention. These results have broader implications for understanding the unusual attention profile of individuals with ASD and how their attention may be shaped by learning.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2013 · doi:10.1002/aur.1274