Social interactions should be taken into consideration when researching gaze behaviours in autism, according to a new study from the University of Eastern Finland and the UCL Knowledge Lab.

Atypical gaze behaviours have long been linked with difficulties in communication and social interaction. For this reason, eye tracking techniques are often used when assessing how gaze patterns differ in persons with or without autism.

However, most eye tracking research is conducted in laboratories where participants observe stimulus presented on a computer screen. While eye tracking glasses can be used to study gaze in more naturalistic settings, the research has been primarily focused on quantification (e.g. the timing or duration of gaze to a particular area). However, eye tracking alone does not give a realistic indication of what gaze is used to communicate in the real world.

According to PhD candidate Katja Dindar from UEF, eye tracking techniques alone do not provide contextual details of the moment–by–moment interactions in which gaze occurs and cannot answer important questions, such as why an instance of gaze has occurred or what it is designed to do in social interaction.

“Eye tracking is traditionally used to quantify gaze behaviours and cannot capture or describe the situations in which gaze is used – such as what people were doing or saying at the specific moment they turned to look at someone or something. This is why social interactions should also be video recorded to render those moments visible. Qualitative approaches can help researchers better understand gaze behaviours,” Dindar says.

In this small–scale study, the research team expanded on traditionally quantitative eye tracking research using video recordings and a qualitative interactional approach to explore the moments when autistic children turned to look at other people. The team also looked at how the other people responded to children’s gaze shifts, which gave an indication of the way gaze contributed to social interactions between the people.

Dr Terhi Korkiakangas from the UCL Knowledge Lab says that social and communicative competencies can be found when children’s gaze behaviours are not examined in isolation but carefully mapped to the behaviour of other people in naturalistic settings. According to the researchers, this combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches seems fruitful for future autism research.