Visual Fixation Patterns During Viewing of Naturalistic Social Situations as Predictors of Social Competence in Individuals With Autism

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Abstract
ADVANCES IN psychological research of the core social deficits in autism have increasingly focused on disruptions in early-emerging skills that seem to derail the processes of socialization.1 Typically developing infants show preferential attention to social rather than inanimate stimuli,2 and they also prefer to focus on the more socially revealing features of the face, such as the eyes rather than the mouth3; in contrast, individuals with autism seem to lack these early social predispositions.4-8 This attenuation to the social world is accompanied by documented abnormalities in face perception, both in face recognition and in identification of facial expressions.9-12 In addition, individuals with autism use atypical strategies when performing such tasks, relying on individual pieces of the face rather than on the overall configuration.5,8 Alongside these perceptual anomalies, individuals with autism have deficits in conceiving other people's mental states (in having a "theory" that other people have minds and then using this knowledge to predict their social behavior).13