The dynamics of eye-to-eye contact in social anxiety and autism: A naturalistic dyadic eye-tracking paradigm
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Final Report Abstract
The aim of this project was to investigate the role of eye contact in naturalistic social interactions. For this purpose, a new eye-tracking paradigm was developed, which allows the simultaneous measurement of the eye movements of two interaction partners in a naturalistic setting. It enabled the analysis of the dynamics of eye contact and thus allowed conclusions to be drawn about the initiation, maintenance, avoidance, and return of eye contact between two interlocutors. Specifically, the two subprojects aimed to investigate gaze behavior in subjects with SAD and ASD in comparison to appropriate control groups. Subjects with ASD and SAD showed significant avoidance of eye contact in previous studies. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that individuals with SAD are particularly sensitive to perceived social threat and that avoidance of eye contact serves to regulate social anxiety in interactions. Consequently, we expected different patterns of initiation and avoidance of eye contact for both groups depending on the level of anticipated threat from the interlocutor: While we expected comparable but reduced eye contact for both groups at low situational threat, we assume that individuals with SAD avoid eye contact particularly strongly at high situational threat. The initial evaluation studies were able to prove that the newly developed eye tracking paradigm can be used to collect reliable and valid eye movement data in natural dyadic interactions. The results of the two study sites in relation to the specifics of ASD and SAD show that gaze behavior in a natural conversational situation differs between the two disorders. In ASD, the most noticeable features were a lower total duration of mutual gaze, less frequent initiations of mutual eye contact, and less frequent reactions to the initiation of mutual gaze by the counterpart. They also interrupted mutual gaze more frequently, especially when they were in the responding role. These effects could not be confirmed in the initial analyses of the data for the group with SAD. Overall, their gaze behavior appeared largely unaltered in social interactions. In summary, it can be concluded that the newly developed dyadic interaction paradigm can be used to generate reliable and valid eye tracking data that could reveal subtle differences in reciprocal gaze behavior in ASD and SAD. The results encourage further studies to modulate reciprocal gaze behavior and explore potential neural, endocrinological, and clinical factors as a basis of functional and dysfunctional social interactions.
Publications
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Evaluation of an eye tracking setup for studying visual attention in face-to-face conversations. Scientific Reports, 11(1).
Vehlen, Antonia; Spenthof, Ines; Tönsing, Daniel; Heinrichs, Markus & Domes, Gregor
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How to choose the size of facial areas of interest in interactive eye tracking. PLOS ONE, 17(2), e0263594.
Vehlen, Antonia; Standard, William & Domes, Gregor
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No evidence that gaze anxiety predicts gaze avoidance behavior during face-to-face social interaction. Scientific Reports, 12(1).
Tönsing, Daniel; Schiller, Bastian; Vehlen, Antonia; Spenthof, Ines; Domes, Gregor & Heinrichs, Markus
