Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 89, Issue 1, August 2003, Pages B43-B51
Cognition

Brief article
Eye contact does not facilitate detection in children with autism

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00081-7Get rights and content

Abstract

Eye contact is crucial in achieving social communication. Deviant patterns of eye contact behavior are found in individuals with autism, who suffer from severe social and communicative deficits. This study used a visual oddball paradigm to investigate whether children with high functioning autism have difficulty in detecting mutual gaze under experimental conditions. The results revealed that children with autism were no better at detecting direct gaze than at detecting averted gaze, which is unlike normal children. This suggests that whereas typically developing children have the ability to detect direct gaze, children with autism do not. This might result in altered eye-contact behavior, which hampers subsequent development of social and communicative skills.

Introduction

Eye gaze direction conveys much information about the internal states of social partners. In particular, mutual gaze (eye contact) is an important signal of another's interest and intentions towards the perceiver (Gibson & Pick, 1963); it serves to establish a communicative context (Kleinke, 1986) and functions in the maternal-infant affective bond (Robson, 1967). Therefore, it is quite natural that humans are especially adept at processing gaze information, especially mutual gaze. In fact, discrimination between direct and averted gaze is highly accurate (Gibson & Pick, 1963), and direct gaze is detected faster than averted gaze (the stare-in-the-crowd effect; von Grünau & Anston, 1995). Moreover, even newborns show a visual preference for direct gaze over averted or closed eyes (Batki et al., 2000, Farroni et al., 2002). These findings suggest that there is an innate, cognitively specialized mechanism for processing mutual gaze.

Impairment in the use of eye contact for non-verbal communication has been argued as a major characteristic of autism (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Individuals with autism show a deviant pattern of mutual or reciprocal gaze behavior with their caregivers and other people (Buitelaar, 1995, Volkmar and Mayes, 1990). In the current ‘theory of mind’ hypothesis, these deficits are thought to be strongly related to their deficits in social and communicative development (Baron-Cohen, 1995).

On the other hand, several experimental studies have found an intact attentional mechanism to process eye gaze, especially decoding its direction and reflexively orienting in the corresponding direction (Neely, 2001, Okada et al., 2002, Senju et al., 2001, Swettenham et al., 2000). However, these findings were limited to the processing of averted gaze, and the functioning of direct gaze processing in individuals with autism is still unknown. Considering the critical role of eye contact in social-communicative behavior, and the pervasive difficulties in social development in autism (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), it is possible that individuals with autism are impaired specifically in mutual gaze processing, not in gaze processing in general.

To date, no previous experiments have found deviant direct gaze processing in autism. Although clinical and observational intuition strongly suggest that the salience of direct eye gaze lacks in autism, it has actually only been folklore up to now.

We investigated this mechanism using a visual oddball paradigm (Garcia-Larrea, Lukaszewicz, & Mauguière, 1992). An oddball task involves presenting a series of frequent stimuli, into which rare stimuli are inserted. This study used two kinds of rare stimuli: one using direct gaze and the other using averted gaze. The participants were instructed to respond to one of the two rare stimuli, while ignoring the other. If failure in establishing a normal pattern of eye contact has a perceptual or attentional background, we predicted that children with autism would not show relative superiority in detecting direct gaze over averted gaze, which is usually the case for typically developing children (von Grünau & Anston, 1995).

Section snippets

Participants

Thirteen children with autism (all males; mean age 12:1 years, range 9:10–14:11 years; mean Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices (RCPM) score 31.8, range 27–36) and 15 age-matched typically developing children (13 males and two females; mean age 12:1 years, range 9:5–14:10 years; mean RCPM score 34.2, range 26–36) participated in this study. All of the children were Japanese, and all were students or graduates of a primary school that is attended by both autistic and typically developing

Results

There was a slight, but significant, group difference in the RCPM scores (t(26)=2.30, P<0.05). Since non-verbal cognitive ability might affect detection accuracy and speed, the RCPM scores were introduced as a covariate in all subsequent analyses of covariance (ANCOVA) to rule out the possible effect of non-verbal cognitive ability.1, 2

Discussion

First, our results show that typically developing children detect faces with a direct gaze more effectively than faces with an averted gaze, which replicates the findings of von Grünau and Anston (1995) in a visual oddball paradigm. Second, and more importantly, the gaze direction of the stimuli had no effect on the performance of children with autism. Accordingly, typically developing children detected direct gaze better than children with autism, while performance in detecting averted gaze

Acknowledgements

We thank all of the participants and their parents, and the teachers and staff at The National Institute of Special Education, who kindly supported our study. Hitoshi Dairoku was always helpful and provided much support and many suggestions throughout the study. Three beautiful models kindly agreed to let us use their photographs as stimuli. A.S. was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows No. 14-08419 by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture, Japan.

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