Effects of Observing Eye Contact on Gaze Following in High-Functioning Autism

Impaired recognition of interactive intentions in adults with autism spectrum disorder not attributable to differences in visual attention or coordination via eye contact and joint attention

Altered nonverbal communication patterns especially with regard to gaze interactions are commonly reported for persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this study we investigate and differentiate for the first time the interplay of attention allocation, the establishment of shared focus (eye contact and joint attention) and the recognition of intentions in gaze interactions in adults with ASD compared to control persons. Participants interacted via gaze with a virtual character (VC), who they believed was controlled by another person. Participants were instructed to ascertain whether their partner was trying to interact with them. In fact, the VC was fully algorithm-controlled and showed either interactive or non-interactive gaze behavior. Participants with ASD were specifically impaired in ascertaining whether their partner was trying to interact with them or not as compared to participants without ASD whereas neither the allocation of attention nor the ability to establish a shared focus were affected. Thus, perception and production of gaze cues seem preserved while the evaluation of gaze cues appeared to be impaired. An additional exploratory analysis suggests that especially the interpretation of contingencies between the interactants' actions are altered in ASD and should be investigated more closely.

When a smile is still a conflict: Affective conflicts from emotional facial expressions of ingroup or outgroup members occur irrespective of the social interaction context

Facial expressions play a crucial role in human interactions. Typically, a positive (negative) expression evokes a congruent positive (negative) reaction within the observer. This congruent behavior is inverted, however, when the same positive (negative) expression is displayed by an outgroup member. Two approaches provide an explanation for this phenomenon. The social intentions account proposes underlying social messages within the facial display, whereas the processing conflict account assumes an affective conflict triggered by incongruent combinations of emotion and the affective connotation of group membership. In three experiments, we aimed at further substantiating the processing conflict account by separating the affective conflict from potential social intentions. For this, we created a new paradigm, in which the participant was an outside observer of a social interaction scene between two faces. Participants were required to respond to the emotional target person that could represent an ingroup or outgroup member. In all three experiments, irrespective of any social intention, responses were consistently affected by the group relation between participant and emotional target, i.e., the affective (in)congruency of the target seen by participants. These results further support the processing conflict account. The implications for the two theoretical accounts are discussed.

Construction of a tool for assessment of joint attention in Egyptian Cairene children

Background

Joint attention (JA) is a basic social communicative skill important for language development. JA deficits appear prior to language acquisition. Because autism is often not diagnosed until a child is three or four years of age, it is important to look for indicators prior to language acquisition such as JA to provide appropriate treatment at a younger age. Therefore, the aim of this study is to construct an objective tool for assessment of joint attention skills in young Egyptian children to detect the presence of autistic behaviour in high-risk children in order to conduct plans for early intervention. The questionnaire was constructed to assess the five main components of JA and was termed Egyptian Joint Attention Questionnaire. The questions were formulated in the colloquial Egyptian Arabic language and in an ‘easy-to understand’ design that would be comprehensible by mothers. No question was directly translated from another questionnaire. Ten typically developing (TD) children, with an age range of 18–54 months, were included in the pilot study of the test design. It was applied to 90 TD children and 30 autistic children (contrast group) within the same age range. Participant's responses were statistically analysed to assess the validity and reliability of the questionnaire and to compare the responses related to TD children and autistic children.

Results

There was high internal consistency and reliability of the questionnaire (Cronbach’s α = 0.9, Intra-class correlation = .776), with a statistically significant difference between TD and autistic children (P < 0.001).

Conclusions

The questionnaire is a valid and reliable assessment tool that could be used in early detection of autistic Egyptian children.

Gaze facilitates responsivity during hand coordinated joint attention

The coordination of attention between individuals is a fundamental part of everyday human social interaction. Previous work has focused on the role of gaze information for guiding responses during joint attention episodes. However, in many contexts, hand gestures such as pointing provide another valuable source of information about the locus of attention. The current study developed a novel virtual reality paradigm to investigate the extent to which initiator gaze information is used by responders to guide joint attention responses in the presence of more visually salient and spatially precise pointing gestures. Dyads were instructed to use pointing gestures to complete a cooperative joint attention task in a virtual environment. Eye and hand tracking enabled real-time interaction and provided objective measures of gaze and pointing behaviours. Initiators displayed gaze behaviours that were spatially congruent with the subsequent pointing gestures. Responders overtly attended to the initiator’s gaze during the joint attention episode. However, both these initiator and responder behaviours were highly variable across individuals. Critically, when responders did overtly attend to their partner’s face, their saccadic reaction times were faster when the initiator’s gaze was also congruent with the pointing gesture, and thus predictive of the joint attention location. These results indicate that humans attend to and process gaze information to facilitate joint attention responsivity, even in contexts where gaze information is implicit to the task and joint attention is explicitly cued by more spatially precise and visually salient pointing gestures.

Me looking at you, looking at me: The stare-in-the-crowd effect and autism spectrum disorder

INTRODUCTION

The stare-in-the-crowd (SITC) effect describes the ability to detect self-directed gaze in a crowd. Given the importance of gaze detection in initiating and maintaining social interactions, there is a need to better characterize the SITC effect.

METHODS

Autistic and neurotypical young adults were presented with four SITC conditions. Eye tracking outcomes and arousal were compared by diagnosis and condition using repeated measures analysis of variance. Hierarchical regression was used to explore behavioral measures.

RESULTS

Significant interaction of diagnosis and condition was found for eye tracking outcomes. Overall, autistic participants exhibited less looking than neurotypical participants. Interest area dwell time, fixation count, and second fixation duration were significantly higher for conditions with shifting gaze, as well as conditions with more self-directed gaze across participants. Two hierarchical regression models of gaze behaviors with advanced theory of mind as a predictor were significant.

DISCUSSION

Autistic individuals respond to various gaze conditions in similar patterns to neurotypical individuals, but to a lesser extent. These findings offer important targets for social interventions.

Descriptive Analyses of Behaviors during Social Interactions

BACKGROUND

Individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders demonstrate difficulty initiating and maintaining eye contact from early infancy into adulthood. However, interventions aimed at improving eye contact lack normative eye contact data to guide treatment.

METHODS

The current study quantified behaviors (e.g., eye contact, vocalizations, head/shoulder, and hand movement) exhibited by college students during social encounters to gather normative data regarding the duration of targeted behaviors. A latent profile analysis was also used to identify participants' patterns of responding.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Participants engaged in high levels of eye contact (M =89.3% of time) and head/shoulder movement (M= 85.0% of time), moderate levels of vocalizations (M= 65.0% of time), and low levels of hand movement (M =35% of time). Results highlight the need for social skills training procedures to target multiple behaviors in conjunction with eye contact and vocalizations. In addition, studies evaluating treatment packages or assessing the relationship between eye contact and other variables (e.g., physiological responses) may use these normative data to inform decisions.

Prospective College Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Parent Perspectives

Young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are attending university in increasing numbers. While those with ASD may be very knowledgeable within their chosen field, a range of academic-related and nonacademic challenges may hinder their success including executive functioning challenges and interpersonal issues. The purpose of this study was to conduct a preliminary investigation into the perspective of parents of high schoolers with ASD regarding their son/daughters' transition to college. Qualitative analysis of parent interviews examined the concerns and challenges they anticipated their son/daughter might experience in a university setting, as well as supports they are seeking as they consider postsecondary options. Prominent themes that emerged as areas of concern were social skills, executive functioning, academics, campus living, and support services. These findings highlight some key potential pitfalls for students with ASD which may be useful targets for prevention and remediation, as well as informing policy for colleges and universities as they consider cost-effective interventions to improve the academic success of students with ASD.

The Role of Eye Gaze During Natural Social Interactions in Typical and Autistic People

Social interactions involve complex exchanges of a variety of social signals, such as gaze, facial expressions, speech and gestures. Focusing on the dual function of eye gaze, this review explores how the presence of an audience, communicative purpose and temporal dynamics of gaze allow interacting partners to achieve successful communication. First, we focus on how being watched modulates social cognition and behavior. We then show that the study of interpersonal gaze processing, particularly gaze temporal dynamics, can provide valuable understanding of social behavior in real interactions. We propose that the Interpersonal Gaze Processing model, which combines both sensing and signaling functions of eye gaze, provides a framework to make sense of gaze patterns in live interactions. Finally, we discuss how autistic individuals process the belief in being watched and interpersonal dynamics of gaze, and suggest that systematic manipulation of factors modulating gaze signaling can reveal which aspects of social eye gaze are challenging in autism.

Responding to joint attention bids in schizophrenia: An interactive eye-tracking study

This study investigated social cognition in schizophrenia using a virtual reality paradigm to capture the dynamic processes of evaluating and responding to eye gaze as an intentional communicative cue. A total of 21 patients with schizophrenia and 21 age-, gender-, and IQ-matched healthy controls completed an interactive computer game with an on-screen avatar that participants believed was controlled by an off-screen partner. On social trials, participants were required to achieve joint attention by correctly interpreting and responding to gaze cues. Participants also completed non-social trials in which they responded to an arrow cue within the same task context. While patients and controls took equivalent time to process communicative intent from gaze shifts, patients made significantly more errors than controls when responding to the directional information conveyed by gaze, but not arrow, cues. Despite no differences in response times to gaze cues between groups, patients were significantly slower than controls when responding to arrow cues. This is the opposite pattern of results previously observed in autistic adults using the same task and suggests that, despite general impairments in attention orienting or oculomotor control, patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a facilitation effect when responding to communicative gaze cues. Findings indicate a hyper-responsivity to gaze cues of communicative intent in schizophrenia. The possible effects of self-referential biases when evaluating gaze direction are discussed, as are clinical implications.

How attention gates social interactions

Social interactions are at the core of social life. However, humans selectively choose their exchange partners and do not engage in all available opportunities for social encounters. In this review, we argue that attentional systems play an important role in guiding the selection of social interactions. Supported by both classic and emerging literature, we identify and characterize the three core processes-perception, interpretation, and evaluation-that interact with attentional systems to modulate selective responses to social environments. Perceptual processes facilitate attentional prioritization of social cues. Interpretative processes link attention with understanding of cues' social meanings and agents' mental states. Evaluative processes determine the perceived value of the source of social information. The interplay between attention and these three routes of processing places attention in a powerful role to manage the selection of the vast amount of social information that individuals encounter on a daily basis and, in turn, gate the selection of social interactions.

Sensitivity to Social Contingency in Adults with High-Functioning Autism during Computer-Mediated Embodied Interaction

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the emerging "second-person approach" to social cognition a more promising framework for studying ASD than classical approaches focusing on mindreading capacities in detached, observer-based arrangements. According to the second-person approach, embodied, perceptual, and embedded or interactive capabilities are also required for understanding others, and these are hypothesized to be compromised in ASD. We therefore recorded the dynamics of real-time sensorimotor interaction in pairs of control participants and participants with High-Functioning Autism (HFA), using the minimalistic human-computer interface paradigm known as "perceptual crossing" (PC). We investigated whether HFA is associated with impaired detection of social contingency, i.e., a reduced sensitivity to the other's responsiveness to one's own behavior. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that, at least under the conditions of this highly simplified, computer-mediated, embodied form of social interaction, people with HFA perform equally well as controls. This finding supports the increasing use of virtual reality interfaces for helping people with ASD to better compensate for their social disabilities. Further dynamical analyses are necessary for a better understanding of the mechanisms that are leading to the somewhat surprising results here obtained.

Joint-Attention and the Social Phenotype of School-Aged Children with ASD

The validity of joint attention assessment in school-aged children with ASD is unclear (Lord, Jones, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 53(5):490-509, 2012). This study examined the feasibility and validity of a parent-report measure of joint attention related behaviors in verbal children and adolescents with ASD. Fifty-two children with ASD and 34 controls were assessed with the Childhood Joint Attention Rating Scale (C-JARS). The C-JARS exhibited internally consistency, α = 0.88, and one factor explained 49% of the scale variance. Factor scores correctly identified between 88 and 94% of the children with ASD and 62-82% of controls. These scores were correlated with the ADOS-2, but not other parent-report symptom measures. The C-JARS appears to assess a unique dimension of the social-phenotype of children with ASD.

STORMy Interactions: Gaze and the Modulation of Mimicry in Adults on the Autism Spectrum

Mimicry involves unconsciously imitating the actions of others and is a powerful and ubiquitous behavior in social interactions. There has been a long debate over whether mimicry is abnormal in people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) and what the causes of any differences might be. Wang and Hamilton's (2012) social top-down response modulation (STORM) model proposed that people with ASC can and do mimic but, unlike neurotypical participants, fail to modulate their mimicry according to the social context. This study used an established mimicry paradigm to test this hypothesis. In neurotypical participants, direct gaze specifically enhanced congruent hand actions as previously found; in the ASC sample, direct gaze led to faster reaction times in both congruent and incongruent movements. This result shows that mimicry is intact in ASC, but is not socially modulated by gaze, as predicted by STORM.

Joint attention difficulties in autistic adults: An interactive eye-tracking study

Joint attention - the ability to coordinate attention with a social partner - is critical for social communication, learning and the regulation of interpersonal relationships. Infants and young children with autism demonstrate impairments in both initiating and responding to joint attention bids in naturalistic settings. However, little is known about joint attention abilities in adults with autism. Here, we tested 17 autistic adults and 17 age- and nonverbal intelligence quotient-matched controls using an interactive eye-tracking paradigm in which participants initiated and responded to joint attention bids with an on-screen avatar. Compared to control participants, autistic adults completed fewer trials successfully. They were also slower to respond to joint attention bids in the first block of testing but performed as well as controls in the second block. There were no group differences in responding to spatial cues on a non-social task with similar attention and oculomotor demands. These experimental results were mirrored in the subjective reports given by participants, with some commenting that they initially found it challenging to communicate using eye gaze, but were able to develop strategies that allowed them to achieve joint attention. Our study indicates that for many autistic individuals, subtle difficulties using eye-gaze information persist well into adulthood.

Observing Third-Party Attentional Relationships Affects Infants' Gaze Following: An Eye-Tracking Study

Not only responding to direct social actions toward themselves, infants also pay attention to relevant information from third-party interactions. However, it is unclear whether and how infants recognize the structure of these interactions. The current study aimed to investigate how infants' observation of third-party attentional relationships influence their subsequent gaze following. Nine-month-old, 1-year-old, and 1.5-year-old infants (N = 72, 37 girls) observed video clips in which a female actor gazed at one of two toys after she and her partner either silently faced each other (face-to-face condition) or looked in opposite directions (back-to-back condition). An eye tracker was used to record the infants' looking behavior (e.g., looking time, looking frequency). The analyses revealed that younger infants followed the actor's gaze toward the target object in both conditions, but this was not the case for the 1.5-year-old infants in the back-to-back condition. Furthermore, we found that infants' gaze following could be negatively predicted by their expectation of the partner's response to the actor's head turn (i.e., they shift their gaze toward the partner immediately after they realize that the actor's head will turn). These findings suggested that the sensitivity to the difference in knowledge and attentional states in the second year of human life could be extended to third-party interactions, even without any direct involvement in the situation. Additionally, a spontaneous concern with the epistemic gap between self and other, as well as between others, develops by this age. These processes might be considered part of the fundamental basis for human communication.

Detecting communicative intent in a computerised test of joint attention

The successful navigation of social interactions depends on a range of cognitive faculties-including the ability to achieve joint attention with others to share information and experiences. We investigated the influence that intention monitoring processes have on gaze-following response times during joint attention. We employed a virtual reality task in which 16 healthy adults engaged in a collaborative game with a virtual partner to locate a target in a visual array. In the Search task, the virtual partner was programmed to engage in non-communicative gaze shifts in search of the target, establish eye contact, and then display a communicative gaze shift to guide the participant to the target. In the NoSearch task, the virtual partner simply established eye contact and then made a single communicative gaze shift towards the target (i.e., there were no non-communicative gaze shifts in search of the target). Thus, only the Search task required participants to monitor their partner's communicative intent before responding to joint attention bids. We found that gaze following was significantly slower in the Search task than the NoSearch task. However, the same effect on response times was not observed when participants completed non-social control versions of the Search and NoSearch tasks, in which the avatar's gaze was replaced by arrow cues. These data demonstrate that the intention monitoring processes involved in differentiating communicative and non-communicative gaze shifts during the Search task had a measurable influence on subsequent joint attention behaviour. The empirical and methodological implications of these findings for the fields of autism and social neuroscience will be discussed.

(How) observed eye-contact modulates gaze following. An fMRI study

Humans are highly sensitive to directional gaze cues and rapidly shift attention in accordance with others' gaze (i.e., gaze following). Besides providing information about the physical environment, for instance, the location of an object, gaze direction can be used to extract information about the social environment, such as whether or not two people are interacting with each other. In the present fMRI study we investigated how these two different types of information conveyed by gaze direction interact with one another. Participants saw two faces that were either looking at each other or away from each other before jointly shifting gaze toward one of two target locations. Targets either appeared at the gazed at or the non-gazed at location. Behaviorally, gaze following (faster responses to congruent versus incongruent trials) was more prominent after observing eye contact than after observing no eye contact. In line with behavioral findings, neuroimaging results revealed enhanced activation in fronto-parietal and temporal areas in congruent trials when faces had looked at each other versus away from each other. These findings demonstrate that observing an attentional relation between others augments processing of their subsequent gaze cues.

Referential gaze and word learning in adults with autism

While typically developing children can use referential gaze to guide their word learning, those with autism spectrum disorder are often described to have problems with that. However, some researchers assume that the ability to follow gaze to select the correct referent can develop in autism later compared to typically developing individuals. To test this assumption, we compared the performance of adults with and without autism on a word learning task while recording their gaze behavior using an eye tracker. Results showed that both groups mostly chose the correct referent, but less so for the autism spectrum disorder group when the distractor’s saliency was increased, suggesting that the ability to learn novel words by referring to gaze develops in autism spectrum disorder, but not fully, relative to their typically developing peers.