Researchers Delve Into Why Autistic Individuals Prefer Reduced Eye Contact

In a new study published in the journal PLOS One, researchers from Yale University pinpointed a specific region of the human brain — known as the dorsal parietal region — that has been associated with the social symptomatology of autism with the help of an ingenuous technology.

A vast majority of autistic people choose not to engage in eye-to-eye contact during social interactions. While the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is at least 1 in 500 people, it is still a widely misunderstood, stigmatized, and complex neurodevelopmental condition.

Real-time interactions between two or more people tend to be dynamic and recoprocal in nature where a person’s facial expressions and eye contact levels are considered as the main sources of information.

A major disability for autistic and adults is them struggling with seamlessly and strategically gleaning vital information from faces during these real-life conversations and interactions. “The importance of investigating real-life facial interactions in ASD has been recognized by recent calls for ‘second-person neuroscience’,” the researchers wrote in their study.

“Our brains are hungry for information about other people, and we need to understand how these social mechanisms operate in the context of a real and interactive world in both typically developed individuals as well as individuals with ASD,” said Joy Hirsch, a psychiatrist at Yale University, in a press release.

Hirsch and colleagues further acknowledged in their paper that neurodevelopmental conditions like ASD are multi-faceted and a wide range of factors need to be taken into consideration — whether biological, cognitive, behavioral, or socio-cultural.

However, to date, neuroimaging techniques have proven to be inadequate for gathering information on “dynamic face processing during real social interactions.” “This has challenged advances in the development of these methods and in understanding the underlying neurobiology of these processes and their variations in ASD,” the researchers explained.

To further investigate, the team used functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a non-invasive optical neuroimaging method. They fitted participants with caps that were full of sensors emitting light into their brains. The researchers then recorded and analyzed the changes in these light signals that corresponded with data on the participants’ brain activity during any eye-to-eye contact between them.

Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that every single time the autistic participants made eye contact with the other participants, there was reduced activity in their respective brain region called the dorsal parietal cortex. But neurotypical participants or those without ASD did not record this change in their brain activity despite making consistent eye contact with others.

“We now not only have a better understanding of the neurobiology of autism and social differences, but also of the underlying neural mechanisms that drive typical social connections,” Hirsch added in a statement.