Social Attention Through a New Lens: Autistic and ADHD Traits and Eye Occlusion Affect Gaze During Conversation Watching

When people watch a pre-recorded conversation, they tend to follow the speaker and spend most of the time looking at the faces and eyes of those talking. To test whether these responses reflect realistic social attention, we eye tracked participants in two experiments where the depicted speakers sometimes wore sunglasses which removed fine-grained information from the eye region. We also examined clinically relevant traits which have been shown to have an effect on social attention, by including individuals with high- and low- traits of autism (Experiment 1) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD; Experiment 2). Those with high levels of autistic traits were less likely to look at key facial features. ADHD symptoms did not have the same effect. When there was a change in speaker, sunglasses disrupted attention such that there were fewer and later looks to the new speaker. Being able to read gaze cues therefore facilitates attention in conversation, and subtle differences in this behaviour may be associated with clinically-relevant traits.