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

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Abstract

Observing eye contact between others enhances the tendency to subsequently follow their gaze and has been suggested to function as a social signal that adds meaning to an upcoming action or event. The present study investigated effects of observed eye contact in high-functioning autism (HFA). Two faces on a screen either looked at or away from each other before providing congruent or incongruent gaze cues to one of two target locations. In contrast to control participants, HFA participants did not depict enhanced gaze following after observing eye contact. Individuals with autism, hence, do not seem to process observed mutual gaze as a social signal indicating the relevance of upcoming (gaze) behaviour. This may be based on the reduced tendency of individuals with HFA to engage in social gaze behavior themselves, and might underlie some of the characteristic deficiencies in social communicative behaviour in autism.

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Notes

  1. Note that the term ‘observed eye contact’ refers to the observation of eye contact between other agents (not the experience of being looked at oneself).

  2. The control group entailed numerically more women than the HFA group and there are indications of larger gaze cueing effects in women (Bayliss et al. 2005). Though the HFA and control group did not differ significantly in terms of age and gender, both variables were included as covariates in additional analyses. Results revealed no interactions of Gender with any of the other factors or with any of the interactions [Fs(1, 50) ≤ 1.9, p ≥ .16, η2 ≤ 0.038] and no effect of Age with any of the factors or interactions [Fs(1, 50) < 1].

  3. It needs to be mentioned that the condition in which the two faces are looking at each other, as opposed to looking away, constitutes a situation in which (a) participants’ attention is drawn to the centre of the screen and (b) the two faces are looking at something together with the participant. Control experiments in the original paper suggest that the enhanced gaze cueing effect after observing direct gaze is not due to either of these potential confounds. Enhanced gaze following was not found when participants’ attention was directed towards the center by non-social cues or when one face looked at an object before providing gaze cues (Böckler et al., 2011).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the Volkswagen Foundation (K.V., L.S.), the Köln Fortune Program of the Medical Faculty at the University of Cologne (L.S.) and the European Science Foundation (A.B., N.S.). We thank Tabea van der Lühe for her assistance with recruitment and testing of the participants with HFA in Cologne and for her help with data administration. We are very thankful to Anne Blankenhorn for her help with recruiting and testing the control participants in Nijmegen and for analyzing and administrating the questionnaires.

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  1. Anne Böckler

    Present address: Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstraße 1, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

  2. Bert Timmermans

    Present address: School of Psychology, King’s College, Aberdeen, UK

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Anne Böckler & Natalie Sebanz

  2. University Hospital Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Bert Timmermans, Kai Vogeley & Leonhard Schilbach

  3. Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Natalie Sebanz

  4. Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine—Cognitive Neuroscience (INM3), Research Center Juelich, Juelich, Germany

    Kai Vogeley

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  1. Anne Böckler
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  2. Bert Timmermans
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Correspondence to Anne Böckler.

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Böckler, A., Timmermans, B., Sebanz, N. et al. Effects of Observing Eye Contact on Gaze Following in High-Functioning Autism. J Autism Dev Disord 44, 1651–1658 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2038-5

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