Eye Focus, Getting Emotional, and Autism
Eye focus and especially eye contact is, for most people, a way of connecting with people. It shows we like the person we’re speaking with. Breaking eye contact, on the other hand, may show we’re embarrassed, lying, or feeling guilty about something. Most of us know it’s different for people with autism, who may find it difficult to maintain eye contact for long. In fact, for the layman, this is probably the hallmark symptom of autism: the inability to make eye contact.
Some people have the impression that people with autism are unemotional, and that this is the reason for the avoidance of eye contact in those on the spectrum. But the facts, obtained through research, show something else. There is evidence to suggest that on the contrary, people with autism feel things more intensely than others—so intensely that it overloads their senses. This is part of what is known as the Intense World Theory of Autism.
Eye Focus Moves To The Mouth
A new study from the University of Vermont seems to underscore this idea: that the world is overly intense for those with autism spectrum disorders. Researchers used eye-tracking technology along with Skype to track eye focus in children with autism during conversation. The scientists found something surprising: children with autism focus on the speaker’s eyes until the conversation turns emotional. At that point, eye focus switches to the speaker’s mouth.
This is the first time scientists have used eye-tracking technology to monitor eye movement of children with autism during conversation. Lead author of the study, Tiffany Hutchins, was surprised that no one had done this before. “We were amazed that no one had done this yet,” said Hutchins. “We found only two other studies that used eye-tracking to look at social attention during actual conversations with other people, but none with autism.
“Combining Skype with basic eye-tracking technology feels like low-hanging fruit, and it circumvents a lot of the traditional challenges that we’ve had in the field so when that catches on, I think the implications are that you can do a lot with this technology. I think being first is one of our major contributions,” said Hutchins, an assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at UV.
The study, which was published in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, could make a difference in the way speech therapists work with the approximately 1 in 68 children on the spectrum. These children must struggle daily with a variety of communication, behavioral, and social challenges. In the clip below, you can see the speaker asking a child with autism about what types of jobs people do. This is an unemotional sort of question. The child’s eyes focus on the speaker’s eyes.
When discussion switches to talking about emotions, for instance, what makes the child scared or sad, eye focus moves to the speaker’s mouth. “What you talk about really matters for children with ASD, you just change a few words by talking about what people do versus how they feel and you can have a profound impact on where eyes go for information.”
Hutchins’ team also found that this shifting of the eye focus away from the eyes to the mouth was associated with more severe autism, with impairment seen in verbal skills, intellectual ability, and more limited executive function.
Asked why the eyes switch focus during an emotional turn in conversation, Hutchins suggests that experiencing emotion puts a strain on the child’s executive function, which is about the way we organize ourselves for tasks. Talking about emotions or highly emotional subjects may “place high demand on working memory, which, when a threshold is surpassed, makes rendering information from the eye region particularly difficult,” says, Hutchins.
In other words, kids on the spectrum reach a certain threshold in how much emotion they can process before it begins to affect their ability to think clearly. At that point, the child can no longer process the information coming from the speaker’s eyes. The emotion has become too overwhelming. The child has lost the ability to receive any more information from this source. So the eyes switch their focus to the next best source of information, the mouth, where the child may still be able to get some information.
Driving In A Snowstorm
Hutchins says that for kids with autism, talking about emotions is difficult and draining. “It’s like driving in a snowstorm. Normally, when you drive around in good weather on a familiar route, you go on automatic pilot and sometimes don’t even remember how you got somewhere. But for a child with ASD, having a conversation, especially one about emotions, is more like driving in a snowstorm. In that situation, you are totally focused, every move is tense and effortful, and your executive function drains away. In fact, we found that decreased working memory correlated with decreased eye fixations, so as working memory decreases, then we see fewer fixations on the eyes.”
Hutchins points out that one of the reasons children with autism have a difficult time with social skills is due to this eye focus problem. The mouth is giving fewer social cues than the oh-so-expressive eyes. As a result of focusing on a speaker’s mouth, a child with autism may not get enough information about the underlying social meaning in the speaker’s words. This can cause the child with autism to respond inappropriately to a social situation.
But the whole point of this is that the child cannot look at the eyes of the speaker when things get more emotional. Eye focus on the eyes becomes impossible. It’s overwhelming. It messes up the child’s brain processes, makes it difficult to think and function.
“It’s probably a situation where the poor are getting poorer,” Hutchins says. “If I’m asking you to talk about emotions, and that makes you even less likely to look in my eyes when you really need to go there because I’m more likely to be showing other evidence of an emotion like anger with my eyebrows, you are missing even more. It’s not that there’s no emotional information in the mouth, but during dynamic conversational exchanges they are missing a number of cues that a typically developing child would not.”
This wasn’t the largest study in the word with just 19 neurotypical children and 18 children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), ages 6-12. But it does seem as if Hutchins and her co-author, Ashley Brien, a speech pathologist, have hit on something important. The two of them are now thinking about whether speech pathologists should change the way they work with children on the spectrum. For instance, telling a child to stay focused on the pathologist’s eyes may be a mistake.
“Some social skills programs and many treatment goals for children with autism involve trying to get them to initiate and sustain eye-contact during interaction” says Hutchins.
Brien explains that forcing eye contact may actually work against kids with autism. Insisting that the child’s eye focus remain on the eyes of the speech pathologist may be too taxing for the brain systems of kids with ASD, so they can no longer access working memory or executive function, for instance. Demanding they maintain eye contact may be as bad for the progress of these children as anxiety and stress.