Recent research has brought mixed results about differences in attention allocation measured by eye tracking between autistic and neurotypical individuals. There are several reasons that might be at the core of this confusion, including the given task. We tested 10 neurotypical adults in our experiment: they filled out a questionnaire based on self-evaluation assessing their position on the autistic spectrum. Their eye movements were recorded while viewing several complex visual scenes in two conditions: free viewing and completing a task. We qualitatively compared the visual strategies of two participants scoring on extreme poles of the spectrum in the analysis. Our findings indicate that the task might play a crucial role in research on attention allocation in autism.

In this paper, we inquire into possible differences between children with exceptionally high intellectual abilities and their average peers as regards metacognitive monitoring and related metacognitive strategies. The question whether gifted children surpass their typically developing peers not only in the intellectual abilities, but also in their level of metacognitive skills, has not been convincingly answered so far. We sought to examine the indicators of metacognitive behavior by means of eye-tracking technology and to compare these findings with the participants’ subjective confidence ratings. Eye-movement data of gifted and average students attending final grades of primary school (4th and 5th grades) were recorded while they dealt with a deductive reasoning task, and four metrics supposed to bear on metacognitive skills, namely the overall trial duration, mean fixation duration, number of regressions and normalized gaze transition entropy, were analyzed. No significant differences between gifted and average children were found in the normalized gaze transition entropy, in mean fixation duration, nor - after controlling for the trial duration – in number of regressions. Both groups of children differed in the time devoted to solving the task. Both groups significantly differed in the association between time devoted to the task and the participants’ subjective confidence rating, where only the gifted children tended to devote more time when they felt less confident. Several implications of these findings are discussed.