After finally reading both Hans Asperger’s and Leo Kanner’s original papers on autism, I’ve decided to do a new series looking at their original ideas and how those ideas evolved into today’s perception of autism. I’m calling the series Unpacking Asperger because the topics I’ve outlined are mostly drawn from Asperger’s paper with some contrasting concepts from Kanner’s work.
Let’s kick things off by unpacking the origins of commonly held beliefs about why autistic people often don’t make eye contact.
Both men wrote a great deal about atypical gaze patterns in autistic children. Kanner believed that autistic children deliberately avoided looking at people, but often fixated on looking at objects. Asperger, on the other hand, observed that “autistic children do not look with a firmly fixed glance at anything, but rather, seem to perceive mainly with their peripheral field of vision.” He went on to say that contrary to their appearance of being detached or absent, the children he studied often perceived and processed a great deal of information about the people and things around them.
While the differences between the two men’s theories about gaze may seem insignificant, they actually point to two distinct ways of thinking about autism. Kanner’s emphasis on the deliberate avoidance of looking at people frames the atypical autistic gaze as an issue of deliberate social withdrawal.
This is often the perception that dominates among professionals today. It’s not uncommon to hear autistic children described as withdrawn, absent, locked or trapped inside their bodies, and other euphemisms that imply that the child is not aware of what is happening around them. And one of the key pieces of evidence offered up is the child’s atypical gaze. They don’t make eye contact. They don’t look at their parents or playmates during playtime. They don’t use joint attention to interact socially.
Often, this perception of the child as being withdrawn is actually the inability of the neurotypical observer to read autistic body language. For example, in this video, where the narrator sees a child who isn’t interacting with the adults in the room, I see a child who is interacting using autistic body language. It’s obvious to me when the child is inviting the adults to look at his toy because I can instinctively read his nonverbal communication. It’s not that he doesn’t want to interact, it’s that he doesn’t know how to broadcast the nonverbal signs that the adults around him perceive as “I want to interact with you.”
Fleeting Glances Over Direct Gaze?
In contrast to Kanner’s focus on social avoidance, Asperger emphasized the fleetingness of the autistic gaze, regardless of the nature of the target–human or object. He believed that autistic gaze was fundamentally different from a typical person’s gaze, not that the autistic person was avoiding looking any one type of thing.
Asperger’s explanation struck me because I know that I have a tendency to visually roam, especially when I’m in a new or chaotic environment.
Even The Scientist, who is very used to my quirks, occasionally notices my erratic eye movement. A recent conversation got me thinking about how unconscious my “fleeting gaze” is. We were having dinner at a restaurant, which is fundamentally a high distractibility situation for me. The Scientist had already suggested that I sit with my back to the open kitchen, which I appreciated him noticing. Being able to hear the kitchen noise is distracting enough.
About twenty minutes into our dinner, a big party got seated at a table behind The Scientist. A few minutes after that, he asked me if I was nervous.
“Why?” I asked, as I so often do in response to questions like this.
“Because your eyes are doing this–” and then demonstrated for me:
“Really?” I was kind of alarmed because I wasn’t aware of either feeling nervous or being all shifty-eyed and erratic looking. But, after considering it, I realized that I’d been glancing at the party behind him quite frequently. There was a lot of movement and noise and distraction. It was hard not to keep looking at them.
Asperger’s explanation for our atypical gaze was that autistic people perceive information via peripheral vision rather than through a direct gaze. I’ve heard other people on the spectrum echo this idea, saying that they prefer to look at people and things peripherally because it feels less intense or more comfortable. For me, atypical gaze is related more to my inability to filter the activity in my environment and, of course, my discomfort with eye contact.
A View From Behind the Gaze
It would be nice to boil the origin of atypical gaze down to one neat hypothesis but I think it’s messier and more complex than that. Sometimes atypical gaze is about taking in information through peripheral vision. Sometimes it’s about visual stimming. Sometimes it’s about avoiding eye contact. Sometimes it’s related to difficulty filtering out sound or movement. Sometimes we’re simply thinking about something and not even paying attention to what we’re “staring” at.
Ultimately, I don’t think the typical autistic gaze is limited to fleeting glances like Asperger hypothesized or to avoiding human gaze but fixating on objects like Kanner hypothesized. I’m as likely to stare at a person as an object. I’m also as likely to glance around randomly at people as at objects. I don’t have a visual preference for one over the other. And this is going to sound bizarre, but if I’m staring at a person, I’m probably not registering them as a person. Often, when I’ve got a fixed stare going on, I’m not consciously aware that I’m looking at anything.
One of the weaknesses of both Asperger’s and Kanner’s theories is that they were guessing at what the children they studied were thinking and assigning motivations for behavior that they themselves had never experienced. Autistic gaze looks much different when you’re behind the gaze than when you’re observing from the outside. And yet, Kanner’s theory is the prevailing view today: atypical gaze = socially withdrawn. Based on that assumption, autistic kids are given therapy to improve their eye contact and teach them how to play correctly. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if autistic gaze is atypical for a myriad of reasons and none of those reasons are deliberate social withdrawal?