Freeth Megan, Morgan Emma, Bugembe Patricia, Brown Aaron
University of Sheffield, UK.
Autism. 2020 Aug;24(6):1482-1493. doi: 10.1177/1362361320909176. Epub 2020 Mar 13.
In order to effectively understand and consider what others are talking about, we sometimes need to follow their line-of-sight to the location at which they are looking, as this can provide important contextual information regarding what they are saying. If we are not able to follow other people's line-of-sight, this could result in social communication difficulties. Here we tested how effectively autistic and neurotypical adults are at following a social partner's line-of-sight during a face-to-face task. In a first study, completed by 14 autistic adult participants of average to above-average verbal ability and 14 neurotypical adult participants, we found that all participants were able to effectively follow the social partner's line-of-sight. We also found that participants tended to be as effective at making these judgements from both a brief, 1s, glance or a long, 5s, stare. However, autistic adults were less accurate, on average, than neurotypical adults overall. In a second study, a separate group of 65 neurotypical adults completed the same line-of-sight judgement task to investigate whether task performance was related to individual variation in self-reported autistic traits. This found that the amount of self-reported autistic traits was not at all related to people's ability to accurately make line-of-sight judgements. This research isolates and furthers our understanding of an important component part of the social communication process and assesses it in a real-world context.
为了有效地理解和思考他人在谈论什么，我们有时需要顺着他们的视线看向他们所注视的位置，因为这能提供与他们所说内容相关的重要背景信息。如果我们无法顺着他人的视线，这可能会导致社交沟通困难。在此，我们测试了自闭症成年患者和神经典型成年患者在面对面任务中顺着社交伙伴视线的能力。在第一项研究中，14名语言能力处于平均水平及以上的自闭症成年参与者和14名神经典型成年参与者完成了该研究，我们发现所有参与者都能够有效地顺着社交伙伴的视线。我们还发现，参与者无论是从短暂的1秒扫视还是长时间的5秒凝视中做出这些判断，效果都差不多。然而，总体而言，自闭症成年患者的判断准确性平均低于神经典型成年患者。在第二项研究中，另一组65名神经典型成年参与者完成了相同的视线判断任务，以调查任务表现是否与自我报告的自闭症特征的个体差异有关。研究发现，自我报告的自闭症特征的数量与人们准确做出视线判断的能力完全无关。这项研究分离并加深了我们对社交沟通过程中一个重要组成部分的理解，并在现实环境中对其进行了评估。
