Although generally encouraged to maintain eye contact as a means of enhancing their social skills, researchers found autistic children follow the same patterns as other children when processing complex information or difficult tasks<\/strong>. Typically developing children and adults look away when asked difficult questions and gaze aversion has been proven in the past to improve the accuracy of responses<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Prof Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon, Associate Dean for Research in the School of Life Sciences at Northumbria University, will present her findings on 15 March as part of Newcastle ScienceFest, a week-long programme of events being held in the city to celebrate scientific endeavour and discovery. The findings will also be reported in next month\u2019s Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry<\/em>.<\/p>\n In the first study of its kind, researchers asked 20 children with autism \u2013 characterised by reduced sociability – and 18 with William\u2019s Syndrome \u2013 associated with hypersociability – to carry out mental arithmetic tests. Both groups engaged in gaze aversion while thinking and increased their gaze aversion as question difficulty increased.<\/p>\n Prof Doherty-Sneddon said: \u201cPrevious research found that children and adults tend to avert their gaze when thinking something through and this principle can now be applied to children with autism too.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough social skills training is important in encouraging eye contact with children with autism, this research demonstrates that gaze aversion, at a certain point within an interaction, is functional in helping them to concentrate on difficult tasks<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n When trying to retrieve information from memory or work out complex problem-solving, looking at someone\u2019s face can actually interfere with the processing of task relevant information<\/strong>. This is, in part, because faces are such rich sources of information that capture our attention.<\/p>\n She added: \u201cThis research will have a major impact in terms of the way teachers interact with these children. When teachers or parents ask a child a difficult question and they look away, our advice would be to wait to allow them to process the information and focus on finding a suitable response.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Northumbria University press release via AlphaGalileo: Children with autism look away from faces when thinking, especially about challenging material, according to new research from Northumbria University. Although generally… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[71,72,45,73,12,118],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1803"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1803"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1804,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1803\/revisions\/1804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Autism.jpg\" "\\"autism\\"")
Children with autism look away from faces when thinking, especially about challenging material<\/strong>, according to new research from Northumbria University.<\/p>\n