Our eye tracking study, funded by the Autism Science Foundation, was recently published in Autism Research. This study took all the elements of our other studies – sex differences in attention to faces, sex differences in attention during dynamic scenes and sex differences in the type of images attended to – and put them all together in one paradigm. We worked with child actors to create scenes that varied in how “social” they were, what toys the scenes featured (“male or female”) and whether the actor’s sex matched with the toy gender.
We found some interesting findings! Sex of the actor influenced attention in that all kids attended to faces more if the actors sex matched their own. Attention to toys was also greater when matched to the subjects sex. “Mismatches” between actor sex and toy gender resulted in differences in attention in both ASD and TD groups, suggesting that societal messages about gender expectations influenced attention. Our findings provide further evidence of heightened attention to faces in ASD girls relative to ASD boys, and indicate that social attention in ASD and TD children is influenced by who (male or female actor) and what (male‐ or female‐associated toy) is being observed.
Thanks to all the families that took part in this research. We loved our eye tracking Saturdays 🙂