One possible interpretation of these seemingly contradictory findings (i.e., persistent delays in spontaneous gaze following
despite normal reflexive sensitivity to gaze cues) is that children with ASD fail to use gaze cues to interpret intention, and make predictions about the behavior of other people. According to such a theory, delays in spontaneous gaze following may be the consequence of a disrupted motivational system where social stimuli are inherently less rewarding. The current study uses eye-tracking to elicit adults’s spontaneous (rather than reflexive) gaze following, using dynamic stimuli designed to simulate naturalistic interactions. That is, participants viewed a series of short videos that show a model at the center of the screen who gazes at a series of target objects that appear/disappear in the four corners of the screen (congruent condition). Participants’ pattern of eye gaze while viewing these stimuli were then compared to a set of control stimuli,where the model shifts her gaze equally as often, but her gaze is directed at the empty corners of the screen while the target appears in a different corner (incongruent condition). Similar stimuli have been presented in two recent fMRI studies, showing reliable differences in cortical activation (i.e., ventral medial frontal cortex; superior temporal sulcus) between the two experimental conditions. Finally, in our own previous research, we used this eye-tracking paradigm to evaluate the gaze patterns of 50 typically developing children between 3 and 9 years of age. Results revealed that children who presented with few parent-reported features of the BAP consistently modulated their eye gaze between the two experimental conditions. In contrast, children who presented with higher levels of sub-clinical symptoms associated with the BAP showed indistinguishable gaze pattern across both conditions. The current brief report aims to investigate whether similar associations between individual differences in participant gaze pattern and features of the BAP are also evident in a sample of typical adults.