Question: in regards to your work before corona virus, about how autistic children view others, what is the most interesting or perhaps shocking thing you’ve discovered?

Simona Skripkauskaite answered on 24 Nov 2020: last edited 24 Nov 2020 10:50 am

Thank you for your question, maria b! At the time I was actually looking into how autistic adults rather than children viewed various images and other people because I wanted to see whether same differences we see in autistic children are also there in adults. One of the things I was looking at was a presence of ‘social bias’ (we tend to prioritise social information over everything else). I think for me the most interesting finding was that while autistic adults looked at other people a bit less and slower than neurotypical comparison group (was expected), they looked at it more than they looked at objects (so the social bias was there). This means that the assumption that autistic people are not interested in people at all and only cared about objects is incorrect. Instead, it seems that the neurotypical people are somewhat “overly obsessed” with other people.