Why is eye contact different for autistics?
For many autistics, reciprocal eye contact is the opposite of natural or effortless. In fact, when we engage with it, it is a very deliberate act and can often cause us distress. This is because the majority of autistics experience eye contact as a form of hyperarousal. We often describe it as:
Experiencing an adverse reaction: We feel fear, anxiety, pain, threat, etc.
Feeling invading: It can feel violating, overly intimate, etc.
Causing sensory overload: It’s too intense or overwhelming, there’s too much visual information, etc.
Socially confusing: It feels awkward, unnatural, embarrassing, difficult to interpret in the other person, etc.
Eye contact research methods
There is a common misconception that autistics avoid eye contact all the time and that this explains many of the reasons we struggle with social interactions. This belief may exist partly because research is predominantly being conducted in laboratory settings, and researchers measure eye contact based on how much we look at a picture of a face. More recently, there has been a push to improve the validity of eye contact research by using realistic scenarios, such as measuring eye contact during a real interaction between two people.
One new study using real social interactions actually found that there is no difference between the gaze of neurotypical and autistic children! They further showed that, unlike popular belief, shared gaze does not relate to shared attention. Another study using live interactions showed that autistics respond to eye contact with real faces differently than with pictured faces. These newer studies call into question whether scientific literature actually understands how eye contact functions for autistics.
In fact, other recent findings show that many of us do engage in eye contact, but the major difference is that our eye contact is asynchronous.
Asynchronous eye contact
Research in non-autistics shows that when two people converse, their eye contact periodically synchronizes, signifying shared attention. In contrast, autistics don’t usually sync eye contact. For example, to reduce sensory overload, many autistics will make eye contact when talking, but not when listening. One explanation for this pattern of behaviour is that due to sensory overload, it is more difficult to concentrate on auditory information while also looking at someone’s eyes. As the study points out, this is particularly detrimental to interactions with neurotypicals because eye contact is most socially expected when listening.
Asynchronous neural activity
This asynchronicity also applies to our brain activity. For two neurotypicals performing eye contact, a region of their brain–the dorsal parietal cortex–syncs activation patterns. In contrast, the dorsal parietal cortex in autistic individuals does not sync activity. Interestingly, this reduction in neural activity seems to correlate with the social differences listed in typical autism diagnosis measures. The more a study participant identified with diagnostic traits relating to social communication and social interaction, the less neural activity they found in the dorsal parietal cortex.
These results imply that eye contact in autism is fundamentally different than in non-autistics—both behaviourally and neurologically. Therefore, it makes sense that eye contact is included in the diagnostic criteria for autism. It is listed under “deficits in nonverbal communication.”
The difference in research
Notice the difference in the research findings vs. common perception. In regular situations, we autistics seemingly perform as well or better than our neurotypical peers. It’s almost as if there is No Place for Autism in many social and employment situations, and research is being cooked up to justify that premise.