Autistic children could be perceiving people’s faces differently, study suggests

Tracking eye movements in autistic children has revealed that they might be perceiving and processing people’s faces differently, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Houston, US, analysed social perception behaviour in almost 400 children, of whom 280 had autism, by monitoring eye movements as they looked at images.

Children on the spectrum processed a face in an “exploratory” manner that included looking at regions that do not have social cues and require minimal gaze—rather than immediately fixating on specific facial regions of interest, the team found.

Children not having the neurodevelopmental condition showed fewer exploratory patterns in eye movements.

Autistic children are known to have trouble with social skills, including looking at another person in the eye while interacting with them.

“In this study, our primary goal was to test the hypothesis that children with autism display qualitatively distinct eye movement patterns during social perception,” said Jason Griffin from the University of Houston, an author of the study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

From the analysis, two patterns of eye movement emerged, said the psychology researcher.

“A focused pattern was characterised by small face regions of interest that captured looking immediately. In contrast, an exploratory pattern was characterised by larger face regions of interest that included non-social objects and did not capture looking immediately,” Griffin explained.

The researchers found that autistic children were more likely to use this explorative method, compared to the focused patterns.

“Decreased likelihood of precisely looking at faces early in social visual processing may be an important feature of autism that is associated with autism-related symptomatology and may reflect less visual sensitivity to face information,” the authors wrote.

They said the study’s findings could help improve facial processing in autistic children.