Eye Contact May Be Overrated

‘What is potentially most interesting about our work is that it shows what people with autism can do given the right circumstances, rather than what they cannot do.’

So says Dr Courtenay Norbury, from Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Oxford, about research suggesting that autistic persons “take note of social cues such as eye contact more closely than previously thought, regardless of whether or not they have an additional language impairment,” as noted in the September 10th Science Daily. Norbury and a team of researchers used eye-tracking devices to record the eye motions of a group of autistic teenage boys, half of whom did not have “language difficulties” and half of whom had “additional language impairments.”

A previous study about social cues and autism had used the same eye-tracking devices and found that “autistic people spent more time fixating on the mouths of people in the scene while non-autistic peers spent more time looking at their eyes.” The “scene” that was shown was a clip from the 1966 black-and-white film, Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, with Elizabeth Taylor: I have always wondered why researchers chose this film. Any scene from it would not be too easy for Charlie to follow. The lack of color would make it much more difficult for him to process and sort out what he was seeing; the dialogue among two women and two men would be equally hard for him to follow, and I rather suspect he would simply ignore the scene. Norbury’s team, on the other hand, showed the autistic teenagers “video-clips of young people interacting in familiar situations.” The researchers made sure that the scenes shown were about things that the participants would watch, rather than about what the researchers had determined would be best from their perspective.

To the surprise of the team, they found no significant increase in the time autistic individuals with language difficulties spent looking at the mouth region compared to those without this additional language problem. In addition, the amount of time both groups with autism spent looking at eyes did not differ from their non-autistic peers.

‘Our work suggests that individuals with autism, like their typically developing peers, can and do attend to important social cues such as the eyes when viewing familiar social scenes. The individuals with autism who had additional language impairments tended to spend less time looking at faces generally, but when they did look at the face, they spent significantly more time looking at eyes than mouths.’

My son Charlie has always had trouble focusing on stationary objects and tracking moving ones; he has been helped a bit in this thanks to prism lenses (which he only now wears while bike-riding). When I have taken Charlie to a movie about things that he is actually familiar with and that he can track (Charlotte’s Web last winter), he definitely watches and is interested and attends (and Charlie saw that movie three times). He was able to identify each animal and the settings (a barn, a home, a school, a carnival). Charlie has not been much of a fan of cartoons because he seems to struggle to track the moving drawings: He has not been interested in any of the Shrek movies (which are, for Charlie, excessively “talky”). But he did sit rapt for most of Over the Hedge which, though computer animated, contained familiar scenes of backyards and the rooms of a house. (I’ll never forgotten him laughing and rocking and jumping in his seat when the animals open the refrigerator and stand in awe of the food all lit up within.) (I meant to take my surfer boy to Surf’s Up this past summer but by the time we got around to it, it was gone from the theaters: We await the DVD.)

Further, the study suggests that eye contact as a marker of social ability may be overrated:

The study also highlighted the variation in the length of time people, both autistic and non-autistic, spend looking at other people’s eyes, suggesting that eye contact is only one of many factors affecting social success.

Given the right circumstances, with appropriate demands and requests, perhaps we can really see what it is kids like Charlie are seeing, and can learn to reorient our own perspective.