Autism
Does eye contact boost automatic imitation in autistic adults?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Autistic adults automatically imitated hand movements just like others, but unlike neurotypical adults their imitation was not boosted by eye contact.
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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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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