Perspective influences eye movements during real-life conversation: Mentalising about self versus others in autism

Social-communication is profoundly impaired among autistic individuals. Difficulties representing others’ mental states have been linked to modulations of gaze and speech, which have also been shown to be impaired in autism. Despite these observed impairments in ‘real-world’ communicative settings, research has mostly focused on lab-based experiments, where the language is highly structured. In a pre-registered experiment, we recorded eye movements and verbal responses while adults (N = 50) engaged in a real-life conversation. Using a novel approach, we also manipulated the perspective that participants adopted by asking them questions that were related to the self, a familiar other, or an unfamiliar other. Results replicated previous work, showing reduced attention to socially relevant information among autistic participants (i.e. less time looking at the experimenter’s face and more time looking around the background), compared to typically developing controls. Importantly, perspective modulated social attention in both groups; talking about an unfamiliar other reduced attention to potentially distracting or resource-demanding social information and increased looks to non-social background. Social attention did not differ between self and familiar other contexts, reflecting greater shared knowledge for familiar/similar others. Autistic participants spent more time looking at the background when talking about an unfamiliar other versus themselves. Future research should investigate the developmental trajectory of this effect and the cognitive mechanisms underlying it. LAY ABSTRACT: Previous lab-based studies suggest that autistic individuals are less attentive to social aspects of their environment. In our study, we recorded the eye movements of autistic and typically developing adults while they engaged in a real-life social interaction with a partner. Results showed that autistic adults were less likely than typically developing adults to look at the experimenter’s face, and instead were more likely to look at the background. Moreover, the perspective that was adopted in the conversation (talking about self versus others) modulated the patterns of eye movements in autistic and non-autistic adults. Overall, people spent less time looking at their conversation partner’s eyes and face and more time looking at the background, when talking about an unfamiliar other compared to when talking about themselves. This pattern was magnified among autistic adults. We conclude that allocating attention to social information during conversation is cognitively effortful, but this can be mitigated when talking about a topic that is familiar to them.