Eye Contact: To Teach or Not to Teach? That is Not the Question
Quit drilling eye contact—set up social interactions so strong that autistic kids choose to look.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Espinosa (2025) wrote a theory paper. It asks: should we teach eye contact or not?
The paper says neither choice is right. Instead, treat eye-looking as any other behavior. If social events make looking worthwhile, kids will look more on their own.
No new data were collected. The article builds on forty years of behavior-analytic work.
What they found
The main idea: eye contact is not a skill to drill. It is a response maintained by social reinforcement.
When conversation, play, or help are valuable, autistic children will look toward faces to get those goodies. The look itself needs no direct teaching.
How this fits with other research
Bryant et al. (1984) showed the idea first. Adults copied a child’s toy play. Eye-looking jumped without any “look at me” prompt. Their small study is the grandparent of Espinosa’s argument.
Davidovitch et al. (2018) later proved that longer gaze at social bids tracks with parent social scores. They treat gaze as a measuring stick, while Espinosa treats it as behavior to be strengthened by natural rewards. Same data, new lens.
Peters et al. (2018) warn against stand-alone perspective-taking drills. Espinosa gives the same warning for eye contact. Both papers push you to teach within real activities, not in isolation.
Why it matters
Stop running “eye contact” programs. Instead, pack your sessions with highly reinforcing social moments. Use favorite games, songs, or help routines. When the fun lives on your face, kids will look without being told. You save trial time, reduce prompt dependence, and build true social motivation.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In recent years, the question has been raised as to whether teaching eye contact to autistic children is an ethically defensible educational objective. In the present article, I suggest that this question may be best answered by first defining contact with the eyes not as behavior, but as a consequence for the behavior of looking. Looking at people’s faces, and in particular the eyes, provides information regarding the discriminative functions and reinforcing value of social stimuli, of people, of what they do, what they say, and what they feel, and is a critical part of all social behavior. Following a brief review of the available behavioral and developmental evidence on eye-looking behavior, its development from birth, and the role it plays in the context of social and verbal learning in early childhood, I suggest that on the topic of eye contact, the question is not simply whether we should or should not teach it. Rather, the question is whether we should seek to establish social interaction as a reinforcer for eye-looking behavior as an educational target for autistic children.
Perspectives on Behavior Science, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s40614-025-00456-2