Salient social cues are prioritized in autism spectrum disorders despite overall decrease in social attention.
Direct eye-gaze still cuts through noise for kids with autism, so use it as a brief spotlight before key instructions.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team used a Stroop-like task to test how social cues grab attention.
Kids with autism and typical kids saw pictures with faces and objects.
Some faces looked straight at the viewer, others looked away.
Researchers timed how long each child took to name the object while ignoring the face.
What they found
Children with autism were less distracted by any face than typical peers.
Yet when a face did distract them, direct eye-gaze caused the biggest slow-down.
Typical kids slowed more for faces than objects; autistic kids showed the opposite pattern.
How this fits with other research
Flanagan et al. (2015) saw no social-orienting deficit in autism, but their task asked kids to look toward cues, not ignore them.
The different results show that autistic kids can follow social cues when prompted, yet still filter them out when they compete with goals.
Chita-Tegmark (2016) pooled 38 eye-tracking studies and found less social looking overall in autism.
Chevallier et al. (2013) add the twist that direct gaze still wins the competition, even when social attention is low.
Why it matters
You can use brief direct gaze to signal important instructions.
Keep competing pictures or shiny objects away during teaching, because non-social items capture autistic attention more than faces.
A quick eye-contact cue before giving a demand may boost compliance without overwhelming the learner.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Present the task material, catch the learner’s eyes for one second, then immediately deliver the instruction while blocking flashy distractors.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Diminished social attention is often considered to be a central deficit in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). We further investigate this hypothesis by measuring the distracting power of social and non-social stimuli in the context of a Stroop task among children with ASD and typically developing controls (TDCs). Our results show that Stroop interference increases with social versus non-social distracters in TDCs, whereas the opposite pattern occurs in ASD. Within social stimuli, however, the superiority of direct gaze previously reported in the literature did not differ between the groups. Our data thus suggest that ASD children assign less weight to social than non-social stimuli, but that within social signals, salient stimuli remain prioritized.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2013 · doi:10.1007/s10803-012-1710-x