The Effects of Storytelling With or Without Social Contextual Information Regarding Eye Gaze and Visual Attention in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development: A Randomized, Controlled Eye-Tracking Study.
Adults with autism keep their eyes off social details during stories unless you give direct cues.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers showed short stories to the adults. Half had autism, half were neurotypical.
An eye-tracker recorded where each person looked on the screen. Some stories included social hints about where to look. Others did not.
What they found
Adults with autism looked less at the storyteller's eyes. The gap was largest when no social hints were given.
Typical adults changed their gaze right away when hints appeared. The autism group barely shifted.
How this fits with other research
Kong et al. (2025) adds a twist: kids with autism plus uncorrected vision problems miss even more face cues. Check glasses before social skills training.
Ahlborn et al. (2008) saw the same narrow focus in children looking at pictures. The pattern now holds into adulthood.
De Meo-Monteil et al. (2019) found adults with autism actually out-perform typical adults on visual timing tasks. So the eye-gaze gap is social, not basic vision.
Why it matters
Story-based lessons are popular, but they fail if the learner never looks at the key social cues. Add clear verbal prompts like “Look at her eyes” or use arrows on the screen. For adults, pair stories with explicit gaze training instead of hoping they pick it up naturally.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Over the course of the last 30 years, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses have increased, thus identifying a large group of aging individuals with ASD. Currently, little is known regarding how aging will affect these individual's neuroanatomy, compared to the neurotypical (NT) population. Because of the anatomical overlap of ASD-related cortical pathology and age-related cortical thinning, both following an anterior-to-posterior severity gradient, we hypothesize adults with ASD will show larger age-related cortical thinning than NT adults. METHODS: We analyzed cortical measurements using available data from the multi-site Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange I (ABIDE I; n=282) and our own cohort of middle-age to older adults with and without ASD (n=47) mostly available in ABIDE II (n=35). We compared correlations between cortical measures and age in right-handed adults with ASD (n=157) and similar NT adults (n = 172), controlling for IQ and site. Participants were 18 to 64 years of age (mean=29.8 years; median=26 years). RESULTS: We found significant differences between diagnosis groups in the relationship between age and cortical thickness for areas of left frontal lobe (pars opercularis), temporal lobe (inferior gyrus, middle gyrus, banks of the superior temporal sulcus, and entorhinal cortex), parietal lobe (inferior gyrus), and lateral occipital lobe. For all areas, adults with ASD showed a greater negative correlation between age and cortical thickness than NT adults. CONCLUSION: As hypothesized, adults with ASD demonstrated exacerbated age-related cortical thinning, compared to NT adults. These differences were the largest and most extensive in the left temporal lobe. Future longitudinal work is warranted to investigate whether differences in brain age trajectories will translate to unique behavioral needs in older adults with ASD.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2022 · doi:10.1016/j.tins.2006.06.004