Eye Tracking Effort Expenditure and Autonomic Arousal to Social and Circumscribed Interest Stimuli in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Dudley et al. (2019) watched adults with autism look at pictures.

Half showed faces. Half showed favorite objects like trains or maps.

An eye tracker measured how hard the adults worked to keep looking.

A tiny camera also watched their pupils to spot autonomic arousal.

Adults with autism gave less effort to social pictures.

Their pupils grew wider for object pictures instead.

Typical adults showed the opposite pattern.

The data say social images hold less reward value for the autism group.

Rivard et al. (2018) seems to disagree. They found no extra brain wave reaction to personal special-interest photos in autistic teens. The gap is likely age and metric: teens picked their own pictures and EEG was used, not pupils.

Shic et al. (2023) extend the story downward. Kids with autism also look less at faces, proving the social-attention gap starts early.

Goulardins et al. (2013) foreshadowed the idea. They saw weaker brain response to emotional faces in autistic teens, hinting that social cues just do not fire up the nervous system as much.

If social images feel less rewarding, asking clients to sustain eye contact may feel like uphill work.

You can raise reward by pairing faces with already-loved items. Show a face next to a train, then slowly move the train further away.

Also watch pupils during table work. A sudden rise may flag hidden interest you can turn into a reinforcer.