Face processing in children with autism: effects of stimulus contents and type.
Autistic kids' unusual face viewing shows up only when faces move in real social scenes, not in still photos.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kleinert et al. (2007) tracked where kids looked while watching short clips of people talking and playing.
Some clips were still photos. Others showed real moving faces.
All kids had autism. A comparison group had typical development.
What they found
Only the moving social scenes showed a clear difference.
Kids with autism looked less at eyes and more at bodies.
Less eye looking linked to lower social skills scores.
How this fits with other research
Begeer et al. (2006) seems to disagree. They found typical face attention when kids were told the faces mattered. The key difference: Sander used still photos and added clear instructions. L et al. used silent moving clips with no task. The contradiction fades when you see the set-ups differ.
Chita-Tegmark (2016) meta-analysis backs L et al. After pooling 38 studies, moving clips with more than one person give the biggest group gaps. Static shots give smaller or no gaps.
Beaumont et al. (2008) conceptually replicate. Autistic kids processed cartoon faces like typical peers but switched to piecemeal scanning with real faces. Together these papers say: medium and context decide whether you spot atypical viewing.
Why it matters
If you test face skills with still photos, you may miss the real-life problem. Use short video clips of natural play during eye-tracking or social skills probes. Note where the child looks, then teach them to shift gaze to eyes and mouths during live interaction.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Swap still flash cards for 5-second silent video clips and record where the learner looks.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Recent eye tracking studies of face processing have produced differing accounts of how and whether children with autism differ from their typically developing peers. The two groups' gaze patterns appear to differ for dynamic videos of social scenes, but not for static photos of isolated individuals. The present study replicated and extended previous research by comparing the gaze patterns of individuals with and without autism for four types of stimuli: social dynamic, social static, isolated dynamic, and isolated static. Participants with autism differed from their typically developing peers only for social-dynamic stimuli; fixation durations were decreased for eye regions and increased for body regions. Further, these fixation durations predicted scores on a measure of social responsiveness. These findings reconcile differences in previous reports by identifying the specific social and dynamic task components associated with autism-related face processing impairments.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2007 · doi:10.1177/1362361307076925