Emily Thao
University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh
Abstract
In this paper, eye gazing will be defined in terms relating to autism and the differences between neural typical brains verses brains with autism will be mentioned. The scholarly articles each will provide their own definitions of eye gazing and different methods to achieve results to their hypotheses. Keywords: joint attention, face processing, neuroscience
Eye Gazing in Individuals with Autism A feature of autism are impairments in using eye gaze to achieve joint attention and to understand the mental states of others. There is numerous research to determine how eye gaze can affect social …show more content…
Eye gaze processing impairments are found early in the development of children with autism. From the article, gaze processing deficits in autism did not seem to be the direction of the gaze but the impairment of using gaze to understand the intentions and mental states of other people. An experiment was conducted by Baron-Cohen (1995), showed pictures of a cartoon face which is named “Charlie.” There were also 4 different types of candies presented and asked the participants which candy does Charlie wants. Children with no autism and children who were developmentally delayed could point to the candy Charlie was gazing at and linked that that candy is what Charlie most preferred. However, children with autism were also able to point to the candy Charlie was gazing towards but when asked which candy does Charlie wanted, children with autism were unable to answer and would guess which candy Charlie might prefer or choose which candy they would want instead. This experiment was concluded that children with autism could perceive direction of gaze, but were unable to use information to infer the mental state of the other