Gaze aversion during social style interactions in autism spectrum disorder and Williams syndrome.
Kids with ASD time their gaze aversion like peers but skip the social tune-up for new people—teach them when to look back.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Doherty-Sneddon et al. (2013) watched kids with autism and kids with Williams syndrome talk with familiar and unfamiliar adults.
They timed how often each child looked away while thinking.
The goal was to see if the kids changed their gaze aversion when the partner changed.
What they found
Both groups looked away while thinking, just like typical kids.
Only the Williams group looked away less when the partner was unfamiliar.
The autism group kept the same gaze pattern no matter who was talking to them.
How this fits with other research
Casey et al. (2009) and Cramm et al. (2009) used eye-tracking and found the same split: autism means shorter face gaze, Williams means longer face gaze.
Freeth et al. (2019) later showed the autism pattern lasts into adulthood—adults with ASD still look less when eye contact is direct.
Hou et al. (2024) links the gaze difference to real-life social trouble: more variable eye movements in autistic kids predict weaker understanding of others’ intentions.
Why it matters
Plan social-skills goals that teach kids WHEN to look, not just to look.
Use partner labels like “new friend” or “teacher” and prompt different gaze rules for each.
Track if the child actually changes looking time with new people—if not, add explicit rehearsal.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
During face-to-face interactions typically developing individuals use gaze aversion (GA), away from their questioner, when thinking. GA is also used when individuals with autism (ASD) and Williams syndrome (WS) are thinking during question-answer interactions. We investigated GA strategies during face-to-face social style interactions with familiar and unfamiliar interlocutors. Participants with WS and ASD used overall typical amounts/patterns of GA with all participants looking away most while thinking and remembering (in contrast to listening and speaking). However there were a couple of specific disorder related differences: participants with WS looked away less when thinking and interacting with unfamiliar interlocutors; in typical development and WS familiarity was associated with reduced gaze aversion, however no such difference was evident in ASD. Results inform typical/atypical social and cognitive phenotypes. We conclude that gaze aversion serves some common functions in typical and atypical development in terms of managing the cognitive and social load of interactions. There are some specific idiosyncracies associated with managing familiarity in ASD and WS with elevated sociability with unfamiliar others in WS and a lack of differentiation to interlocutor familiarity in ASD. Regardless of the familiarity of the interlocutor, GA is associated with thinking for typically developing as well as atypically developing groups. Social skills training must take this into account.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2012.09.022