Eye Direction, Not Movement Direction, Predicts Attention Shifts in Those with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Experiments suggesting that a change in eye gaze creates a reflexive attention shift tend to confound motion direction and terminal eye direction. However, motion and the onset of motion are known to capture attention. Current thinking about social cognition in autism suggests that there might be a deficit in responding to social (eye gaze) cues but not non-social (motion direction) cues, making the current study theoretically critical. We …