Does eye contact boost automatic imitation in autistic adults?
Autistic adults automatically imitated hand movements just like others, but unlike neurotypical adults their imitation was not boosted by eye contact.
Source
STORMy Interactions: Gaze and the Modulation of Mimicry in Adults on the Autism Spectrum
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Stimulus-response compatibility task: 2 gaze (direct/averted) x 2 congruency (mimic/not) within subjects, compared between autistic and neurotypical adults.
- N
- N=53 · 27 neurotypical adults and 26 autistic adults recruited; one neurotypical outlier removed from analysis.
- Population
- Adults with autism spectrum conditions and matched neurotypical adults from a UCL participant database
- Outcome
- Reaction time to perform a pre-specified hand opening/closing, and a percentage congruency effect as the mimicry index
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What they did
Autistic and neurotypical adults matched on age, sex, handedness and IQ watched videos of an actor who either looked at them (direct gaze) or away (averted gaze) and then opened or closed her hand. Participants had to make a movement fixed in advance for each block, which was either the same as (congruent) or opposite to (incongruent) the actor's movement. Faster congruent than incongruent responses index the automatic tendency to mimic, and the team tested whether gaze changed that tendency.
What they found
Both groups showed a strong congruency effect, so basic automatic imitation was intact in autism. In neurotypical adults, direct gaze enlarged the mimicry effect (percentage congruency effect bigger after direct gaze), whereas in autistic adults gaze did not change mimicry at all; the group-by-gaze interaction on this measure was significant. Autistic participants were instead faster on all trials after direct gaze, suggesting gaze worked as a general alerting signal. Autistic participants were slower overall, and the pattern held when only those meeting ADOS cut-offs were analysed.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The samples were modest and several key interactions in the raw reaction-time analysis were only marginal, so the main support comes from the percentage-based measure. Mimicry was measured in a controlled lab task with a video actor, which may not reflect spontaneous imitation in real conversations. Eight autistic participants did not meet ADOS cut-offs, and the design cannot show which brain mechanism fails to link gaze to mimicry.
Key terms
- Mimicry (automatic imitation)
- The unconscious tendency to copy other people's actions, measured here as faster responses when your movement matches the one you see.
- STORM
- Social Top-dOwn Response Modulation theory: mimicry is controlled top-down by social cues, and in autism this social control, not mimicry itself, is atypical.
- Stimulus-response compatibility task
- A task where people make a pre-specified movement while watching a movement that either matches or conflicts with it.
- Congruency effect
- The reaction-time cost of incongruent compared with congruent trials; a larger effect means a stronger pull to imitate.
- Percentage congruency effect
- The congruency effect divided by a person's overall mean reaction time, so slower responders are not unfairly credited with more mimicry.
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Quiz yourself
Which effect was present in both autistic and neurotypical adults?
Common questions
Does this study show that autistic people cannot imitate?
No. Autistic adults showed a clear congruency effect, meaning automatic imitation itself was intact; what differed was the social modulation of imitation by eye contact.
Why did the authors convert reaction times into a percentage?
Autistic participants responded more slowly overall, and slower responders naturally show bigger raw congruency effects, so expressing the effect relative to mean reaction time made the groups comparable.
Did autistic participants ignore gaze completely?
No. They responded faster to everything after direct gaze, which suggests they noticed it as an alerting signal but did not use it as a social cue to adjust mimicry.
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