The use of eye-tracking to explore social difficulties in cognitively able students with autism spectrum disorder: A pilot investigation

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder do not just ‘grow out of’ their early difficulties in understanding the social world. Even for those who are cognitively able, autism-related difficulties continue into adulthood. Atypicalities attending to and interpreting communicative signals from others can provide barriers to success in education, employment and relationships. In the current study, we use eye-tracking during real social interaction to explore attention to social cues (e.g. face, eyes, mouth) and links to social awareness in a group of cognitively able University students with autism spectrum disorder and typically developing students from the same University. During the interaction, students with autism spectrum disorder showed less eye fixation and more mouth fixation than typically developing students. Importantly, while 63% of typically developing participants reported thinking they were deceived about the true nature of the interaction, only 9% of autism spectrum disorder participants picked up this subtle social signal. We argue that understanding how these social attentional and social awareness difficulties manifest during adulthood is important given the growing number of adults with autism spectrum disorder who are attending higher level education. These adults may be particularly susceptible to drop-out due to demands of coping in situations where social awareness is so important.

How Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Watch and Interpret Pragmatically Complex Scenes

“…However, even relatively mild difficulties of pragmatic understanding can have important consequences (Hanley et al, 2015;Tobin et al, 2014). If an individual repeatedly does not notice hidden insults or indirectly expressed feelings of offense, he or she probably finds it hard to follow everyday social interactions, which may have negative effects on the social functioning and well-being of the individual.…”

“…Individuals with ASD and their neurotypical peers differ in how they look at social features, but the group differences are not consistent across conditions (for reviews see Falck-Ytter & von Hofsten, 2011;Guillon et al, 2014). Naturalistic and complex stimuli, such as social scenes, seem to provoke differences more effectively than nonnaturalistic or relatively simple stimuli, such as isolated faces (Hanley et al, 2015;Hanley, McPhillips, Mulhern, & Riby, 2013;Speer, Cook, McMahon, & Clark, 2007). Most studies that used dynamic stimuli, as opposed to static pictures, reported group differences (Bird, Press, & Richardson, 2011;Klin, Jones, Schultz, Volkmar, & Cohen, 2002;Speer et al, 2007).…”

“…Even subtle social difficulties may have negative long-term impact on a person's wellbeing, and it is therefore important to recognise the difficulties high-functioning individuals with ASD experience, and develop ways of supporting these individuals (Hanley et al, 2015;Tobin et al, 2014). Eye tracking methods provide the possibility to directly assess how highfunctioning individuals with ASD watch social interactions, and may help bridge commonly occurring gaps between evaluation outcomes and real-world manifestations of the disorder (Guillon, Hadjikhani, Baduel, & Rogé, 2014;Hanley et al, 2015).…”

“…Even subtle social difficulties may have negative long-term impact on a person's wellbeing, and it is therefore important to recognise the difficulties high-functioning individuals with ASD experience, and develop ways of supporting these individuals (Hanley et al, 2015;Tobin et al, 2014). Eye tracking methods provide the possibility to directly assess how highfunctioning individuals with ASD watch social interactions, and may help bridge commonly occurring gaps between evaluation outcomes and real-world manifestations of the disorder (Guillon, Hadjikhani, Baduel, & Rogé, 2014;Hanley et al, 2015). It has been suggested that subtle but clinically relevant impairments could effectively be detected by combining eye tracking and a verbal task (Freeth, Ropar et al, 2011), or by focusing on the moment-tomoment structure of eye movements (Falck-Ytter, Von Hofsten, Gillberg, & Fernell, 2013;Nakano et al, 2010).…”

An interactional “live eye tracking” study in autism spectrum disorder: combining qualitative and quantitative approaches in the study of gaze

“…Falck-Ytter and von Hofsten (2011) have stressed that the viewing of videos places participants in the role of a passive receiver of social information and lacks interactional opportunities for participation with other people (Falck-Ytter & von Hofsten, 2011;Gobel et al 2015;Guillon et al 2014). Recent developments have A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 4 4 attempted to overcome some of these limitations using face-to-face situations in which eye movements are measured using mobile equipment; to date, only a handful of such live eye tracking studies exist (Falck-Ytter, 2015;Falck-Ytter et al 2015;Freeth et al 2013;Hanley et al 2014;Hanley et al 2015;Magrelli et al 2013;Nadig et al 2010;Noris et al 2012; Thorup et al 2016;Vabalas & Freeth, 2016).…”