Eye-tracking is a tool that helps researchers study how people look at faces, objects, and social interactions by measuring their gaze. For over 20 years, it has been widely used in autism research to compare where autistic and non-autistic individuals focus their attention.

🔹 Research has often suggested that autistic individuals look at faces—especially eyes—less than non-autistic individuals, and this has been linked to differences in social engagement and communication.
🔹 But here’s the problem: eye-tracking studies have been designed based on neurotypical expectations of what social attention should look like. For example, they assume that looking at someone's eyes means you are engaged, while looking away means you are not.
🔹 This simplistic interpretation does not fully capture how autistic people experience and process social interactions, and yet, eye-tracking research has remained largely unchanged for two decades.

Instead of measuring how well autistic individuals fit neurotypical patterns, we should ask:
✅ What does social attention look like for autistic people?
✅ How do they engage with people and social cues in their own way?
✅ What can autistic individuals teach us about making eye-tracking more meaningful?

Our study addresses these questions by working directly with autistic people, autistic children and their families to understand their experiences with eye-tracking research.

Traditional research relies on questionnaires and interviews, but we know that children—especially neurodivergent children—express themselves in many different ways.

That’s why we’re using the MOSAIC method, a participatory, multi-method approach that allows children to communicate their experiences through:
🎨 Drawing and poster-making – expressing thoughts through visuals.
📷 Taking pictures – showing what is important to them.
🗣 Role play and storytelling – acting out their experiences with eye-tracking.
🌳 The "Wish Tree" – writing suggestions and feedback on paper leaves.

Autistic adults, parents and researchers will also contribute their perspectives, helping us piece together a holistic picture of how autistic children experience eye-tracking research.

✅ More Accurate and Ethical Research
By designing eye-tracking with autistic people, we will move away from outdated assumptions and create a research framework that actually reflects their experiences.

✅ Better Support for Social Interactions
Most social skills training for autistic individuals is based on neurotypical eye-tracking data, which may explain why many programs show little effectiveness. Our research could help develop autistic-informed interventions that actually work by focusing on natural autistic social cues, not neurotypical ones.

✅ Inclusion of Underrepresented Communities
By conducting research in the UK, Italy, and China, we ensure that autistic perspectives from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds are included, making future research more representative and inclusive.

✅ Empowering the Autism Community
Rather than being passive subjects of research, autistic children and their families will actively shape how their social attention is understood and studied.

💡 In short: We’re not just studying eye-tracking in autism—we’re rethinking it from the ground up.