No abstract

Background: Recent studies suggest that the funding breakdown of autism research in the United States may not align with stakeholder priorities. Furthermore, the majority of stakeholder-engaged research involves parents of autistic individuals rather than autistic adults themselves, who may have differing perspectives on research and funding priorities. Women and non-binary adults have been historically underrepresented in autism research. Objectives: The goal of the current study was to examine the autism research priorities of a group of autistic adults, with a particular focus on how these priorities are influenced by one’s gender identity. Design: A concurrent mixed-methods design was used for this study. Methods: Seventy-one autistic adults ( n  = 18 men, n = 29 women, n = 24 non-binary adults) completed an online survey regarding the current funding landscape for autism research. Participants ranked the main research topics of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) and identified top-priority research areas through free-text responses. Response themes were analyzed using content analysis and compared with the existing topic rankings. Results: Overall rankings of IACC research areas had a near inverse relationship with the amount of funding per research area. Main themes of stakeholder-generated research topics included “Characterization,” “Societal Change,” “Well-Being & Trauma,” “Diagnosis & Healthcare,” and “Accessibility & Services.” There was a relatively high overlap between topics identified by the IACC and by the stakeholder-generated topics. Subtle but important differences in topics arose based on gender, with women and non-binary adults identifying topics that were not identified by autistic men. Conclusion: Unique priorities generated by those typically excluded from autism research development underscore the importance of co-creating research with underrepresented stakeholders impacted by this work. The current study echoes the growing movement in the field of autism research to center autistic perspectives at every stage of research, including the establishment of funding priorities.

Eye tracking has long been used to characterize differences in social attention between autistic and non‐autistic children, but recent work has shown that these patterns may vary widely according to the biological sex of the participants and the social complexity and gender‐typicality of the eye tracking stimuli (e.g., barbies vs. transformers). To better understand effects of sex, social complexity, and object gender‐typicality on social and non‐social gaze behavior in autism, we compared the visual attention patterns of 67 autistic (ASD) and non‐autistic (NA) males (M) and females (F) (ASD M = 21; ASD F = 18; NA M = 14; NA F = 14) across four eye tracking paradigms varying in social complexity and object gender‐typicality. We found consistency across paradigms in terms of overall attention and attention to social stimuli, but attention to objects varied when paradigms considered gender in their stimulus design. Children attended more to gendered objects, particularly when the gender‐typicality of the object matched their assigned sex. These results demonstrate that visual social attention in autism is affected by interactions between a child's biological sex, social scene complexity, and object gender‐typicality and have broad implications for the design and interpretation of eye tracking studies.

No abstract

No abstract