Autism Awareness Month: Eye contact

Every year, I write a post about eye contact.  This is a combination of posts that I have written in the past as well as some new information.

When I first started in working with individuals on the autism spectrum, I remember writing goals like, “Johnny will maintain eye contact for a 2 minute period.”  Apparently my long term goal involved the creating some type of stalker.  Two minutes is an extraordinarily long time to try to maintain steady eye contact. If you don’t believe me, try this exercise.  Go on the city bus. Find a stranger and attempt to maintain eye contact for 2 minutes.

Then I heard Temple Grandin speak.  She talked about how it can be very difficult for her to listen and look at someone at the same time.  It becomes too difficult to combine the information from auditory and visual information.

SO I started teaching my clients to look at someone’s nose when they are talking to them.  My clients would still be looking towards the person but they wouldn’t have to try to process the visual and auditory information at the same time.  Brilliant, I thought to myself.  

Well, not really.  I went to one of Jill Kuzma’s courses where she talked about how she teaches her students to identify emotions by breaking it down into individual parts (what do angry eyebrows look like.)  Ruh-roh.  Based on that lecture, I realized that noses give very little information related to emotions, thoughts or intentions.

Individuals with Autism have reported that eye contact is painful. Others have said that if they are looking at you they can’t listen. I’ve thought about some of my kids on the autism spectrum as one channel processors. For instance, if they are looking at the something very visually appealing, they may not respond to our verbal overtures. They may attend to smaller details but have difficulty synthesizing everything they see and hear to come up with the whole picture.

There’s an app for everything and there is even an app for Eye contact.  I’d be curious to hear from someone if this app results in increased eye contact across environments.  I’m skeptical that training children to look into the eyes of an image on a computer screen would translate into benefits in real life.  Especially since it seems part of the difficulty with eye contact is the ability to process the visual information with the auditory information.  Also, the eyes of the people on the app change into numbers.  (this is how they track whether or not the student was looking in the eyes of the person talking.)

Most of my early goals in eye contact were directed more for the listener’s comfort than for any consistent benefit for my clients.  If my clients are better able to listen and attend without eye contact than perhaps we should just stop working on it all together.  Joel Shaul from Autism Teaching Strategies lists reasons why we wouldn’t want to force eye contact and provides helpful suggestions for alternative positioning for conversations to decrease the stress of eye contact.

Over the last 18 years that I have been practicing, I have revised and refined my approach to eye contact.  I never insist on eye contact with a client or force eye contact on a client through physical manipulation.  I do have a series of activities that I use to teach facial referencing, as well as comprehension of eye gaze and joint attention.  Want to read more?  Check out some of these resources:

• Autism Teaching Strategies: Eye Contact: Times to Avoid It when teaching Social Skills
• Eye contact: a letter written by a child with Autism
• What’s the Deal with Eye contact

Come back tomorrow to learn about some of my favorite activities for facial referencing and eye gaze training.