Eye Gaze And Autism

Eye Gazing in Individuals with Autism
Emily Thao
University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

Abstract
In this paper, eye gazing will be defined in terms relating to autism and the differences between neural typical brains verses brains with autism will be mentioned. The scholarly articles each will provide their own definitions of eye gazing and different methods to achieve results to their hypotheses. Keywords: joint attention, face processing, neuroscience

Eye Gazing in Individuals with Autism A feature of autism are impairments in using eye gaze to achieve joint attention and to understand the mental states of others. There is numerous research to determine how eye gaze can affect social
connections and where in the brain that is being stimulated. Also, there are various of techniques and methods on how to conduct neurological data in these experiments. These are the basis of what will be looked out throughout the paper.
Literature Review Pelphrey, Morris, and McCarthy (2004) found that there are deficits in aspects of social cognition and theory of mind in autism.
Eye gaze processing impairments are found early in the development of children with autism. From the article, gaze processing deficits in autism did not seem to be the direction of the gaze but the impairment of using gaze to understand the intentions and mental states of other people. An experiment was conducted by Baron-Cohen (1995), showed pictures of a cartoon face which is named “Charlie.” There were also 4 different types of candies presented and asked the participants which candy does Charlie wants. Children with no autism and children who were developmentally delayed could point to the candy Charlie was gazing at and linked that that candy is what Charlie most preferred. However, children with autism were also able to point to the candy Charlie was gazing towards but when asked which candy does Charlie wanted, children with autism were unable to answer and would guess which candy Charlie might prefer or choose which candy they would want instead. This experiment was concluded that children with autism could perceive direction of gaze, but were unable to use information to infer the mental state of the other
person.
Also, there is a link from these deficits to the areas of the brain such as in the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) region. The STS region is sensitive to the social context when a gaze shift occurs (Pelphrey, Morris, & McCarthy, 2004). To be able to see this data, the study was observed in the right posterior STS region which the gaze shifts away from a target, in other words, incongruent shifts, compared with gaze shifts toward the target, which are congruent shifts. The study demonstrated that the STS region plays a critical role in processing eye gaze signals of approach and avoidance, and responses to the other observed human actions including reaching-to-grasp movements of the arm and hand (Pelphrey et al., 2004). Therefore, this supported the conclusion that the STS is involved in the visual analysis of social information conveyed by gaze direction and body movement.
Another study conducted by Grice et al., sought to determine the neural basis of eye gaze perception by using the high-density event related potential (HD-ERP) technique with young children.