Looking, seeing and believing in autism: Eye movements reveal how subtle cognitive processing differences impact in the social domain.
Autistic adults need more eye fixations and time to spot social oddities, so slow the pace and cue the key detail.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Benson et al. (2016) watched where adults with autism looked while they viewed photos of social scenes.
Each scene held one odd detail, like a person wearing a winter coat on a beach.
The team counted how many eye fixations and how much time each adult needed to spot the weird part.
What they found
Adults with autism needed more looks and extra time to notice the social oddity.
Neurotypical adults often saw the problem in one glance; autistic adults kept searching.
The delay shows a subtle, on-line hiccup in social processing, not a total lack of skill.
How this fits with other research
Sipes et al. (2011) saw the same slow pattern in autistic teens viewing complex scenes, so the issue persists across age groups.
Hou et al. (2024) extended the finding downward to autistic children, linking more scattered eye movements to weaker action prediction.
Baharav et al. (2008) seems to disagree: their autistic adults spotted non-social scene changes just fine. The gap closes when you see Eva tested general schema violations, not social oddities. Social context, not general attention, drives the delay.
Why it matters
When you run social skills groups, give clients extra seconds to process scenes, photos, or video clips.
Point out the key social cue aloud and have clients practice rapid “spot the oddity” drills.
These small pacing tweaks honor real processing differences and can cut missed social signals in fast classroom or work conversations.
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Join Free →Show a photo with one social oddity, give the client three seconds, then point and label the oddity aloud; repeat with new photos until detection speeds up.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Adults with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) viewed scenes with people in them, while having their eye movements recorded. The task was to indicate, using a button press, whether the pictures were normal, or in some way weird or odd. Oddities in the pictures were categorized as violations of either perceptual or social norms. Compared to a Typically Developed (TD) control group, the ASD participants were equally able to categorize the scenes as odd or normal, but they took longer to respond. The eye movement patterns showed that the ASD group made more fixations and revisits to the target areas in the odd scenes compared with the TD group. Additionally, when the ASD group first fixated the target areas in the scenes, they failed to initially detect the social oddities. These two findings have clear implications for processing difficulties in ASD for the social domain, where it is important to detect social cues on-line, and where there is little opportunity to go back and recheck possible cues in fast dynamic interactions. Autism Res 2016, 9: 879-887. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1580