Social partner gaze direction and conversational phase; factors affecting social attention during face-to-face conversations in autistic adults?
Direct eye contact reduces face looking in autistic adults—try slightly averted gaze to increase social attention during conversations.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Freeth et al. (2019) watched autistic and neurotypical adults talk with a partner.
The partner either looked straight at the adult or looked slightly away.
Eye trackers measured how much each adult looked at the partner’s face.
What they found
Autistic adults looked less at the face when the partner stared straight at them.
When the partner looked away, both groups looked about the same amount.
Direct eye contact cut social looking in autistic adults, not in neurotypical adults.
How this fits with other research
Uono et al. (2021) seems to disagree. They found autistic adults detect eye contact as well as neurotypicals. The gap is in the task: one study asked, “Is this eye contact?” while the other watched real conversation. Passive detection is intact; live reciprocity is hard.
Clin et al. (2023) conceptually replicate the 2019 result. They showed that avoiding eye contact stresses neurotypicals but not autistic adults, matching the idea that direct gaze feels different for each group.
Tantam et al. (1993) first saw the same pattern in a small case study. Autistic adults looked away when the interviewer spoke, hinting that gaze aversion during social load is a long-standing finding.
Why it matters
You can ease social sessions by shifting your own gaze a few degrees off center. Try looking at the bridge of the nose or the eyebrow line. The autistic adult may then look at your face longer, giving you more teaching moments without extra demands.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Look at the client’s forehead or nose tip, not the eyes, and count if face looking increases.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Social attention is atypical in autism. However, the majority of evidence for this claim comes from studies where the social partner is not physically present and the participants are children. Consequently, to ensure acquisition of a comprehensive overview of social attention in autism, systematic analysis of factors known to influence face-to-face social attention in neurotypicals is necessary and evidence from adulthood is required. This study assessed the influence of experimenter gaze direction (direct or averted) and conversational phase (speaking or listening) on social attention during a face-to-face conversation. Eye-tracking analyses indicated that when the experimenter looked directly at the participant, autistic adults looked at the experimenter's face less than did neurotypical adults. However, this between-group difference was significantly reduced when the experimenter's gaze was averted. Therefore, opportunities for reciprocal social gaze are missed by autistic adults when the social partner makes direct eye contact. A greater proportion of time was spent fixating the experimenter's eye region when participants were speaking compared to listening in both neurotypical and autistic adults. Overall, this study provides a rich picture of the nature of social attention in face-to-face conversations adopted by autistic adults and demonstrates individual variation in social attention styles.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2019 · doi:10.1177/1362361318756786