Autistic adults exhibit a typical search advantage for facing dyads.
Tim Vestner, Bayparvah Kaur Gehdu, Katie L H Gray and 1 others
PMID 39544158WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic and non-autistic adults showed no difference in their advantage for finding face-to-face pairs.
Both groups found face-to-face pairs faster than back-to-back pairs, though autistic adults were slower overall.
Key findings
01The size of the face-to-face search advantage did not differ between autistic and non-autistic adults.
02Both groups found face-to-face targets faster than back-to-back targets: 151 ms in autistic participants and 158 ms in non-autistic participants.
03Autistic participants responded slower overall than non-autistic participants.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The sample was online and included many more women than men in the autistic group (38 of 48 described their sex as female), so it may not represent the wider autistic population. The task used only profile face pairs, so it does not show how autistic adults would process whole-body interactions or real social scenes. The study did not test a treatment, diagnosis, communication outcome, or everyday function, so it does not tell therapists how to intervene. The authors call the evidence preliminary and note that larger distractor sets or whole-body stimuli might reveal differences. Autistic participants had more face-recognition difficulty and higher alexithymia than controls, but these traits did not correlate with the search advantage.
Declared interests
The supplied text lists research support from a non-U.S. government source but does not give a detailed funding or conflict-of-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that autistic adults have typical social perception or that this task can guide therapy. The study only measured how quickly people found pairs of profile faces arranged face-to-face versus back-to-back on a computer task, and it did not test real social interaction or therapy outcomes.