Social attention in the wild - fixations to the eyes and autistic traits during a naturalistic interaction in a healthy sample.
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Single-cohort cross-sectional observational study examining correlations between gaze behavior and self-reported traits.
PubMed 39627271 · doi:10.1038/s41598-024-79210-8
What was done
Mobile eye-tracking paired with an automated face-detection algorithm (MTCNN) was used to measure eye-region fixation rates during an unrestrained, semi-structured face-to-face interview in N = 62 healthy adult participants. Fixation metrics across the full interaction and across open versus closed question types were correlated with self-reported autistic traits measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ).
What was found
There was a statistically significant negative correlation between average fixation rates on the interviewer's eye region and AQ scores (r = -0.14), indicating that participants with higher autistic traits spent less time fixating on the eyes. No specific numerical values were reported in the abstract for the comparison between open and closed question intervals.
Why it matters
It demonstrates the feasibility of combining automated face detection with mobile eye-tracking to capture social gaze dynamics during reciprocal, naturalistic human interactions rather than screen-based tasks.
Limits
The study evaluated a non-clinical convenience sample of healthy adults rather than individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The observed correlation was very weak (r = -0.14), the sample size was modest (N = 62), and detailed statistics for the sub-analyses were omitted from the abstract.