The use of eye-tracking to explore social difficulties in cognitively able students with autism spectrum disorder: A pilot investigation.
Even bright university students with autism look away from eyes and miss social tricks—give them clear eye-orientation cues.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hanley et al. (2015) watched university students talk to a live actor.
Half the students had autism. All had average or higher IQs.
An eye-tracker measured where they looked during the chat.
A hidden camera caught whether they spotted a small social trick.
What they found
Students with autism looked at the actor’s eyes far less than peers.
They also missed the tiny social lie more often.
Even bright adults with autism can skip key eye-area cues.
How this fits with other research
Vernetti et al. (2024) saw the same reduced eye gaze in toddlers.
The pattern starts early and stays into college years.
Wang et al. (2023) seems to disagree: preschoolers with autism boosted eye gaze when they had to pick a face.
The gap is about age and task. Little kids can raise gaze when the game demands it; young adults in free chat do not.
Cohrs et al. (2017) and Müller et al. (2016) echo the college finding: less eye looking links to poorer social scores across school and teen years.
Why it matters
Tell older clients exactly where to look during job interviews or group work.
Add quick prompts like “check the eyes” before key social moments.
Use short active tasks, not long open chats, if you want to train eye contact.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder do not just 'grow out of' their early difficulties in understanding the social world. Even for those who are cognitively able, autism-related difficulties continue into adulthood. Atypicalities attending to and interpreting communicative signals from others can provide barriers to success in education, employment and relationships. In the current study, we use eye-tracking during real social interaction to explore attention to social cues (e.g. face, eyes, mouth) and links to social awareness in a group of cognitively able University students with autism spectrum disorder and typically developing students from the same University. During the interaction, students with autism spectrum disorder showed less eye fixation and more mouth fixation than typically developing students. Importantly, while 63% of typically developing participants reported thinking they were deceived about the true nature of the interaction, only 9% of autism spectrum disorder participants picked up this subtle social signal. We argue that understanding how these social attentional and social awareness difficulties manifest during adulthood is important given the growing number of adults with autism spectrum disorder who are attending higher level education. These adults may be particularly susceptible to drop-out due to demands of coping in situations where social awareness is so important.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2015 · doi:10.1177/1362361315580767