Visual attention to faces in children with autism spectrum disorder: are there sex differences?

The analysed autism girl group was small (19 children), so sex differences may be unstable. The autism group was chronologically older than the typical group, and age was controlled rather than balanced. The task was not designed to test sex differences, because boy and girl actors were not equally represented and gendered toy effects were not examined. Children with autism attended less to the screen overall (76% versus 88%), so the analysis relied on relative face looking rather than raw looking time. Only about 5 minutes of gaze were analysed, and non-face areas such as hands and background objects were not examined. This was an observational eye-tracking study, not a test of an intervention, so it cannot show that changing face attention improves communication or social outcomes.

Funding came from the Autism Science Foundation, the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The supplied text does not state author conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that girls with autism have typical social attention because they look at faces more than boys with autism. They still looked less at faces than typical girls during interactive play, and the study did not test whether increasing face looking improves communication.