Social gaze differences between autistic and non-autistic youth in getting-to-know-you peer conversations

Background: Successful peer interactions impact the well-being of autistic and non-autistic youth. Social gaze is important in social interactions as it facilitates detecting information from and signaling information to the social partner. However, while previous work has identified differences between autistic and non-autistic youth in gaze patterns while viewing social videos, no work to-date has directly measured differences in autistic and non-autistic youth in gaze during face-to-face peer interactions.Methods: Autistic and non-autistic youth ages 11-15 years completed a face-to-face social interaction with a novel peer while wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses to measure gaze. The interaction consisted of three tasks: a getting-to-know-you conversation, a vacation-planning task, and a video-watching task. Fixations to the face were compared between autistic and non-autistic youth across the three contexts.Results: Autistic youth fixated less on their partner’s face than non-autistic youth, and these gaze differences varied across interaction contexts. Gaze differences between autistic and non-autistic youth were most pronounced during the unstructured initial getting-to-know-you conversation and absent during the structured video-watching task.Conclusions: Context impacts gaze for autistic and non-autistic youth, such that the social attention patterns of autistic youth differ the most from their non-autistic peers during unstructured initial conversations. These gaze differences provide autistic youth with reduced opportunities to sense and signal information about their social environments, emphasizing that supports for peer interactions may be especially crucial when navigating these initial, unstructured meetings. In turn, reduced gaze signaling may also impact peers’ understanding of autistic youth, with implications for the development of autism acceptance programming that incorporates acknowledging and accepting potential gaze differences.