What is it about?
Children with autism often take longer to look at faces when shown pictures with both people and objects. This study of 269 school-age children with ASD and 118 neurotypical children from the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials found that this isn’t because children with autism are “stuck” looking at objects, but because faces don’t automatically grab their attention in the same way. Using eye tracking, we measured how quickly children looked at faces and how many other things they looked at first. Autistic children looked at more objects before looking at faces, but didn't look at individual objects for longer, suggesting faces are less prioritized in their visual attention. This subtle difference helps explain why social interactions may be different for autistic children. Further, taking longer to look at faces was associated with greater adaptive social challenges in autism, suggesting an attentional mismatch with interactional expectations impacts the perceived quality of real-world social interactions.
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Why is it important?
This study is among the largest studies to explore how and why autistic children take longer to look at faces. By teasing apart different explanations -- reduced social prioritization of faces versus difficulty shifting attention away from objects -- it shows that social de-prioritization, not “sticky attention,” drives this delayed focus. This study clarifies the mechanisms impacting social attention in autism and provides a link between social attention and real-world social differences in ASD. These findings could help shape strategies for supporting social learning in autism and better refining interactional expectations to more successfully engage with autistic youth.
Perspectives
This work puts a microscope to the attentional exploration of children with autism, and through that lens lets us see how they perceive and process their world. In our daily lives, if we're infatuated with anything, it's with each other -- it's hard to think of a day when people aren't first and foremost on our minds. This work reminds us that there are different ways of perceiving the world, that those small differences may cascade through development, and that our -- almost automatic, pre-programmed, and perhaps overly rigid social expectations -- should not be presumed to be universal.
Frederick Shic
Seattle Children's
Autism research has long examined where autistic children direct their attention, particularly toward faces. This new study advances the field by shifting the focus from where to how autistic children look at faces, providing a richer understanding of social attention.
Jason Griffin
University of Houston
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reduced social prioritization: An underlying mechanism driving slower latency to look at faces in autism., Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, October 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/abn0001026.
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