About eye contact - can I ask a question?

[amber32002]

I'm always slightly puzzled by the amount of importance that eye contact has for people who are not on the autistic spectrum. I'm just writing here as someone who's on the autistic spectrum and is really trying to understand this.

If a child was blind, clearly they wouldn't be able to make eye contact, and I guess no-one would be trying to insist they did.

People on the autistic spectrum often find eye contact painful and distressing and overloading because of the disability, (I certainly do). Rewarding us for doing something that 'hurts' (as some methods do when trying to teach children) has always seemed a bit odd. Research suggests that we avoid eye contact because the flickering of people's eye movements causes our brains to overload, as we have a hypersensitive bit in the brain.

For me, nothing happens when I look into someone's eyes other than me thinking "Oh heck - what on earth can I do to make it stop?" If I do manage it, I can't make it 'natural', so people end up thinking I'm lying, or being evasive, or being aggressive - so it's actually more of a problem than not doing it. The subtleties that others manage automatically can't be done by me at all. I know that when other people look into each other's eyes, there's a pattern of glance, look away, glance, look away that controls and regulates the contact between them, what they think of each other. The size of the pupils shows whether they like each other or not. So much natural automatic communication happens. Not for me it doesn't. It's like living in a world where everyone else can play the piano to international standards, and all I can do after 40+ years is tap out a rather flat tune with two fingers which annoys everyone around me, perhaps more than if I just kept my hands off the keyboard.

What happens when you look into someone's eyes? What does it teach you? I wish I could understand...

www.autismresearchcentre.com/arc/default.asp

Thanks Aci - I have found links to many interesting papers on this site.

I had a quick look at the 'Eye test' for children and I had no idea what any of the eye expressions were supposed to be saying..... In real life, I have tended to judge reliability or truth in what someone is saying by the tone of voice rather than by looking at their eyes. So I'd better not try the adult 'Eye test' !!

I tried that too, and was hopeless! so you're not your own .

The eye test on there is great - I did it a while ago and the result was that I might as well have been guessing randomly. How on earth could there be different emotions conveyed from those eyes? Even when they explained it, I couldn't see a single thing they were talking about, not even if I tried decoding it as they'd suggested.

I read a great bit of bizarre scientific research the other day, too, about how scientists had given a load of 'normal' children a new practical task, and a load of ASD children the same new practical task. There was the same teacher for both. The children with ASD were less good at it. They noticed the children with an ASD looked at the face of teacher of the task less often, and concluded that this was the reason why they were less good at the task: Because they couldn't see the emotions of the person teaching them, so didn't understand why they had to do it (!). Nothing to do with our brain wiring being different for manual tasks, then, eh? How does this prove anything? I learned to play an instrument to concert level without once looking at my teacher, but give me a lump of clay to mould into a shape and you might as well give up and go home. Why? Because I was interested in the instrument, and hate touching clay. In neither case did I look at the teacher.

And...if I was learning carpentry, I'd want to be looking at where the saw or hammer was going as I'm not very co-ordinated. Finding out whether the teacher was happy or sad by staring at their face would probably result in me losing some fingers. We can't switch attention backwards and forwards fast as our brains won't do it - the wiring's wired up differently! If they teach these children to break concentration and look for emotions instead, I'd expect the accident book to get a lot more entries in it.

Thanks mabanana - that's all interesting stuff I'd not seen before. I think the Eyes test has a few problems, but it does reliably hgihlight some differences between ASD and non-ASD users.

I'm just analysing my data on attention switching etc and attention switching appears to be highly associated with handling social interactions, which I found surprising (but another resesarcher also found this).

I don't really see how you could conclude that not looking at the teacher's face was the cause of poorer task completion - sounds like correlation being over-interpreted as causal.

Peachy - I'm not totally comfortable with eye contact but I am allergic to talking on the phone, which is a problem (I never talk to my ILS overseas and they must think I'm quite rude). However, you are 'talking' to us now without eye contact!

Acinonyx, I think of it this way re the attention-switching and eyesight stuff:

Imagine the standard person has a 'broadband connection' to all of their incoming senses, so they're able to download incoming sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, process it, throw out all the stuff that's not useful, pick out the stuff that is, and then work out the right response.

Me, in a way I think it's like I have the hyperupgraded superfast broadband that not only gives me the basics of what I'm seeing (for example), but gives me everything. The whole lot. Same for the other senses. Every bloomin' detail. It's like tuning in for a bit of light peaceful music on Radio 3 and finding yourself at a Heavy Metal Rock Concert in the front row. So I can only concentrate on a tiny bit of it at once, otherwise I get swamped with it. Swapping about between people and trying to work out which bit of the info is important is totally exhausting. If exhausted, my brain will switch the whole lot off and I simply won't hear someone at all, or notice someone at all.

Asking us to keep swapping attention is asking us to switch from front row of the rock concert to front row of the pop concert and back to front row of the rock concert again. Glad everyone else can do that and not get overwhelmed, but it's not right for me.

ah now acy- i can type, write very well but that's never been an issue; it really is talking I struggle with but I have quite marked eyesight problems so it may well be linked to that I guess?