Web users with autism: eye tracking evidence for differences

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people with autism may have different processing strategies when accessing the web. However, limited empirical evidence is available to support this. This paper presents an eye tracking study with 18 participants with high-functioning autism and 18 neurotypical participants to investigate the similarities and differences between these two groups in terms of how they search for information within web pages. According to our analysis, people with autism are likely to be less successful in completing their searching tasks. They also have a tendency to look at more elements on web pages and make more transitions between the elements in comparison to neurotypical people. In addition, they tend to make shorter but more frequent fixations on elements which are not directly related to a given search task. Therefore, this paper presents the first empirical study to investigate how people with autism differ from neurotypical people when they search for information within web pages based on an in-depth statistical analysis of their gaze patterns.

Gaze and Motor Traces of Language Processing: Evidence from Autism Spectrum Disorders in Comparison to Typical Controls

“…This finding suggests problems even in high-functioning individuals with autism with the processing of information in multiple modalities and multi-modal information integration, which are evident when both visual (gesture) and auditory (language) information have to be processed. Eraslan, Yaneva, Yesilada, and Harper (2019) is, to the best of our knowledge, the only study to employ eye tracking collecting a number of measures of the type we report in the current one.…”

Detecting High-Functioning Autism in Adults Using Eye Tracking and Machine Learning

“…The differences in visual attention between people with autism and neurotypical people are well documented in the literature (e.g., [13]- [18]). Atypical visual-attention patterns refect higher-order differences in information processing, as the focus of attention directs the input of information from the environment.…”

Adults with High-functioning Autism Process Web Pages With Similar Accuracy but Higher Cognitive Effort Compared to Controls

“…These differences are pronounced enough to allow for people with and without autism to be automatically differentiated between with 75% accuracy based on their gaze patterns alone [17]. At present, such differences are found mainly in longer and more highly variable eye-tracking scanpaths among web users with autism, indicating uncertainty in searching [6], and a focus on a larger amount of page elements irrelevant to the main task [7]. Notably, while there have been autismspecific efforts toward improving the accessibility of the text component [18,16,19,15], investigations of the visual and organizational components of web pages are still very rare.…”

“…While scarce, there is also evidence suggesting that atypical visual attention causes web users with autism to interact with the web differently. Previous work reports that "people with autism tend to employ different information searching strategies when processing web pages" [7]. These differences are pronounced enough to allow for people with and without autism to be automatically differentiated between with 75% accuracy based on their gaze patterns alone [17].…”