The role of face familiarity in eye tracking of faces by individuals with autism spectrum disorders.
Familiar faces alone do not normalize where adults with ASD look—add an active task if you want eye contact to rise.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sterling et al. (2008) watched where adults with autism looked when they saw photos of faces.
Half of the faces were people they knew well. The other half were strangers.
The team used an eye tracker to map exact gaze points and also ran quick recognition tests.
What they found
Familiar faces did not pull the ASD group’s eyes toward the eyes or mouth any more than unknown faces.
Recognition speed and accuracy were the same for both groups, so knowing the face helped memory but not gaze.
How this fits with other research
MacDonald et al. (2007) asked the same question one year earlier and also found no special boost from familiarity, backing the null result.
Wang et al. (2023) seem to disagree: preschoolers with ASD looked more at eyes when they had to pick out a face instead of just watching. The difference is task power—active jobs can drive gaze while passive viewing cannot.
Vernetti et al. (2024) widened the lens to toddlers in live play and still saw low social gaze no matter who the partner was, proving the Lindsey pattern holds outside the lab photo world.
Why it matters
Do not count on “they know me” to fix social looking. If you want clients to scan faces, build in an active goal—name the face, find the match, or answer a question about it. Pair people and objects with clear tasks instead of hoping familiarity will pull eyes upward.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
It has been shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) demonstrate normal activation in the fusiform gyrus when viewing familiar, but not unfamiliar faces. The current study utilized eye tracking to investigate patterns of attention underlying familiar versus unfamiliar face processing in ASD. Eye movements of 18 typically developing participants and 17 individuals with ASD were recorded while passively viewing three face categories: unfamiliar non-repeating faces, a repeating highly familiar face, and a repeating previously unfamiliar face. Results suggest that individuals with ASD do not exhibit more normative gaze patterns when viewing familiar faces. A second task assessed facial recognition accuracy and response time for familiar and novel faces. The groups did not differ on accuracy or reaction times.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2008 · doi:10.1016/j.dr.2007.06.006