Shall we do this together? Social gaze influences action control in a comparison group, but not in individuals with high-functioning autism.
Social gaze speeds neurotypical action but not autistic action, so add extra cues or let clients steer the gaze.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Schilbach et al. (2012) watched adults with high-functioning autism and neurotypical adults play a simple computer game.
A face on the screen looked either at the button the player needed to hit or away from it.
The team measured how fast each group pressed the button after the gaze cue.
What they found
Neurotypical adults hit the button faster when the face looked at it first.
Adults with autism pressed the button just as fast no matter where the face looked.
Social gaze gave typical adults a speed boost that autistic adults simply did not get.
How this fits with other research
Dratsch et al. (2013) saw the same missing boost. They let autistic adults control the gaze themselves and suddenly the cue worked, showing the gap is not permanent.
Uono et al. (2021) seemed to disagree: their autistic adults detected eye contact just fine. The difference is detection versus action; seeing the eyes and using them to move faster are two separate steps.
Freeth et al. (2019) moved the test into real conversation and found autistic adults looked away when eye contact was direct, extending the same gaze-modulation problem to everyday talk.
Why it matters
You cannot assume a client will pick up on your glance during instruction. If you need quick action, pair eye gaze with a clear point or verbal cue, or let the client lead the looking. Build sessions where the client actively controls eye contact instead of passively receiving it.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Perceiving someone else's gaze shift toward an object can influence how this object will be manipulated by the observer, suggesting a modulatory effect of a gaze-based social context on action control. High-functioning autism (HFA) is characterized by impairments of social interaction, which may be associated with an inability to automatically integrate socially relevant nonverbal cues when generating actions. To explore these hypotheses, we made use of a stimulus-response compatibility paradigm in which a comparison group and patients with HFA were asked to generate spatially congruent or incongruent motor responses to changes in a face, a face-like and an object stimulus. Results demonstrate that while in the comparison group being looked at by a virtual other leads to a reduction of reaction time costs associated with generating a spatially incongruent response, this effect is not present in the HFA group. We suggest that this modulatory effect of social gaze on action control might play an important role in direct social interactions by helping to coordinate one's actions with those of someone else. Future research should focus on these implicit mechanisms of interpersonal alignment ('online' social cognition), which might be at the very heart of the difficulties individuals with autism experience in everyday social encounters.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2012 · doi:10.1177/1362361311409258