How adolescents with ASD process social information in complex scenes. combining evidence from eye movements and verbal descriptions.
High-functioning ASD teens notice social cues even when their eyes skip faces—so ask them directly.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched high-functioning teens with ASD and typical peers view busy photos.
An eye-tracker recorded where each teen looked.
After each photo the teen told the researcher what was happening.
What they found
The ASD teens spent less time looking at people in the pictures.
Still, when they spoke, they named emotions and eye-direction just as well as the typical group.
Eye data said “people don’t pop out,” yet their words showed they still got the social facts.
How this fits with other research
Busch et al. (2010) saw the same teen group track gaze cues but not follow them; adding their words shows the missing step is shifting, not noticing.
Goulardins et al. (2013) also found weaker brain response to emotional faces in ASD teens; Megan et al. match this with real-time eye and talk data.
Hochhauser et al. (2018) seems to disagree—ASD teens spotted picture changes faster than peers. The tasks differ: change-hunt versus free-view social scenes, so both results can be true.
Why it matters
Your client may not look at faces much, yet still read the mood. Ask “How is she feeling?” instead of waiting for eye contact. Pair questions with brief pointing cues to teach them where to look next.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We investigated attention, encoding and processing of social aspects of complex photographic scenes. Twenty-four high-functioning adolescents (aged 11-16) with ASD and 24 typically developing matched control participants viewed and then described a series of scenes, each containing a person. Analyses of eye movements and verbal descriptions provided converging evidence that both groups displayed general interest in the person in each scene but the salience of the person was reduced for the ASD participants. Nevertheless, the verbal descriptions revealed that participants with ASD frequently processed the observed person's emotion or mental state without prompting. They also often mentioned eye-gaze direction, and there was evidence from eye movements and verbal descriptions that gaze was followed accurately. The combination of evidence from eye movements and verbal descriptions provides a rich insight into the way stimuli are processed overall. The merits of using these methods within the same paradigm are discussed.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2011 · doi:10.1007/s10803-010-1053-4