Conversational topic moderates social attention in autism spectrum disorder: Talking about emotions is like driving in a snowstorm

We compared the visual attention of typically developing (TD) children and age-matched children with ASD in two conversational contexts. Compared to the TD group, the ASD group had significantly fewer fixations to eyes and increased fixation time to mouths during a conversation about 'how people feel' but not about 'what people do'. This shift away from eyes and towards the mouth in ASD was associated with higher autism severity, more limited executive function (EF), and poorer verbal and intellectual ability. One particularly striking result was that eye-fixation and mouth-time data correlated with different EF subdomains. We argue that talk about emotions strains EF which may contribute to atypical visual attention to faces and that eye-fixation and mouth-time data may be under the control of different facets of EF. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.