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The Problem with Using Eye-Gaze to Infer Desire: A Deficit of Cue Inference in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder?

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Abstract

Children with autism respond atypically to eye-gaze cues, arguably because they fail to understand that eye-gaze conveys mentalistic information. Three experiments investigated whether a difficulty in inferring desire from eye-gaze in autism reflects a failure to understand the mentalistic significance of eye-gaze, an inhibitory deficit or a deficit of cue inference. While there was an inhibitory component to the tasks, children with autism were no more affected by this than controls. In addition, individuals’ impairment in inferring desire was not limited to social cues, but was also observed when desire was cued by more general cues. Consequently, children with autism may have a general deficit in using arbitrary cues to make inferences, which impacts particularly on their social development.

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Notes

  1. The homogeneity of regression slopes assumption was met for all analyses except that of Experiment 1a when the interaction between BPVS scores and group was significant (p  < .01). However, the inclusion of this covariate does not change the outcome relative to the uncovaried analysis. Hence, both BPVS and Ravens scores are included as covariates throughout.

  2. All planned comparisons are between the ASD group and an equally weighted combination of the TD and MLD groups.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Sefton Park Infant Junior School, Fosse Way School and Florence Brown Community School for their help and cooperation with this research. This work was supported by a Ph.D. studentship from the Medical Research Council of the UK (G78/8079).

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  1. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, 12a Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK

    Catherine S. Ames & Christopher Jarrold

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  1. Catherine S. Ames
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  2. Christopher Jarrold
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Correspondence to Catherine S. Ames.

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Ames, C.S., Jarrold, C. The Problem with Using Eye-Gaze to Infer Desire: A Deficit of Cue Inference in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder?. J Autism Dev Disord 37, 1761–1775 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-006-0309-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-006-0309-5

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