Communication, Gaze and Autism

A Multimodal Interaction Perspective

Terhi Korkiakangas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317221258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

In this innovative book on autism and gaze from a multimodal interaction perspective, Terhi Korkiakangas examines the role of gaze in everyday situations, asking why eye contact matters, and considering the implications of this crucial question for autism. Since persons on the autism spectrum tend to use it differently and might not engage in eye contact in social situations, gaze is a crucial topic for understanding autism, yet we know surprisingly little about this topic in a real-world context, beyond psychological experiments and the research lab.

Drawing on her research on authentic video-recorded social interactions, Korkiakangas shows how a multimodal interaction perspective can shed new light on gaze: what an instance of gaze does, and when, why, and for whom gaze 'matters', from both children on the autism spectrum and their social partners' perspective, including teachers and parents. Grounded in the interactional tradition of conversation analysis, the multimodal interaction perspective offers a major contribution to our understanding of autism by examining communication beyond talk and linguistic resources. Communication, Gaze and Autism considers both mutual gaze and gaze aversion during talk or silence, alongside facial expressions, gestures, and other body movements, to understand what gaze is used for, and to rethink 'eye contact'. The book includes a methodological introduction, practical tools for doing multimodal interaction research, and empirical findings. It also considers the voices of those people on the autism spectrum from the blogosphere, who suggest that eye contact has less significance for them and represents a communication difference, rather than a deficit.

This book is designed for anyone with an academic, professional or personal interest in autism. It will particularly appeal to senior undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of communication, social interaction and autism.

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Communication, Gaze and Autism

Mapping the terrain

I may not look you in the eye but that doesn’t mean I’m not taking in what you’re saying.

(Jeanette Purkis, an autistic author)

Gaze is held in high regard for human communication, and the term eye contact is perhaps familiar to most people. Communication and gaze are also concepts central in the literature on autism. The communicative importance of the eyes has been the focus of extensive scholarly investigation, both in psychology and its allied fields, including neurosciences, and in the sociologically rooted study of social interaction. In this book, I will consider both types of evidence. The main -stream autism research dominated by psychology primarily suggests that gaze behaviours in autism deviate from the gaze of typically developing people. The direction of gaze has been usually taken as a marker of a person’s attention; gaze enables us to generate information not only from the environment but also of other people. It is such socially relevant attention to other people where gaze atypicalities in autism have been discussed, and theories link these to socio-cognitive challenges in understanding other people and their mental states, and the communicative value of gaze overall. Most of this research draws on experimental tasks or controlled laboratory observations, and we know relatively little about gaze in real-world settings.

As the eminent autism researcher, Patricia Howlin, already put it in 1986, ‘definitions of what actually constitutes normal gaze behaviour are notoriously imprecise’ (p. 113). This includes the typical norms around gaze and communi -cation against which the behaviour of autistic persons is compared. Three decades on, cognitive gaze research has seen cutting-edge developments, including eye tracking, yet we have not quite cracked the code of why gaze matters in actual social interactions, such as conversations between people. Based on the assumption that autism has been fundamentally characterised by challenges in communication and social interaction, it is rather surprising that naturalistic, real-time interactions have received limited research attention. Most of such information comes from reports from parents and teachers who often describe difficulties in making eye contact with autistic children. Yet rarely do we stop and question the significance of gaze to our everyday interactions: what gaze does, who uses it and when. This is important since, in social interactions, gaze is not static but has movement: we do not continually look into each other’s eyes. So, if an autistic person does not engage in mutual gaze, when and why is it considered a ‘problem’? The idea pursued in psychological sciences that links gaze atypicalities to socio-cognitive impairments runs contrary to how many autistic persons seem to experience gaze in social situations. In recent years, persons who identify as autistic have gained voice through writing and blogging, providing insight into sensorial reasons in relation to gaze that do not necessarily relate to a person’s social interest or ability to connect with others; the quote by Jeanette Purkis at the start of this chapter is a case in point.

In this book, I will propose a new way of capturing the role of gaze as part of lived social experiences: an interactional framework which can simultaneously unpack our questions about normative gaze behaviour, which is essential for when we want to understand gaze in autism. Investigating autistic children’s use of gaze in real social settings, namely at homes and in schools, the book introduces a multimodal interaction perspective to the study of autism, examining empirically how parents and teachers make judgements of and respond to autistic children’s gaze in real time, and how autistic children themselves make such judgements and use gaze in social interactions. In doing so, the book aims to demystify the role of gaze in social interactions, rethink the psychological notions of gaze that emphasise autism-related impairments, and interrogate our typical norms around gaze and communication, and the conditions under which these might become disabling to autistic persons.

Notes about terminology

In this book, I move away from deficit orientated language in relation to autism, which is reflected in my choice of terminology. First, for the sake of simplicity, and to avoid reproducing the unsettled notion of autism as a disorder, I will with -hold the use of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) diagnostic label, autism spectrum disorder, and use autism instead.¹ However, where the diagnostic label or the term disorder appear in text, I will use these in refer -ence to the DSM category or other researchers’ work where such labels have been used by those scholars.

Second, I will use identity-first language: I will refer to autistic persons or autistic children, rather than to persons or children with autism. While labels are often a matter of dispute and controversy, in this book, I use the former formulation which is widely used and preferred by many (though not all) of those who identify as autistic (Kenny et al., 2015). This conveys the idea that autism is a pervasive part of their identity; not something they ‘have’ but something they ‘are’ – autistic. The latter formulation, person-first language (a person with autism) is widely used in scientific literature, but also by many clinicians and parents. In my previous publications, also I have used person-first language to sit more easily within the predominant scholarly discourse on autism. The emphasis behind the person-first language is on a person that comes first: a person has autism but this ought not to define him or her. Roger Collier (2012) notes that such political correctness has good intentions behind it; as he puts it, ‘no reasonable person would challenge the intent behind person-first language. Who, after all, would prefer to be known as a condition rather than as a person?’

However, this formulation conceptualises autism as a condition or a disorder that has to be separated from the person: it is something additional to the person, as opposed to an integral part of personhood, and something undesirable – as it were, there is ‘a normal person trapped behind the autism’ (Jaarsma & Welin, 2012, p. 21). Jim Sinclair (2013/1999), an autistic writer, explains this conundrum of the person-first language:

We talk about left-handed people, not ‘people with left-handedness’, and about athletic or musical people, not about ‘people with athleticism’ or ‘people with musicality’. We might call someone a ‘blue-eyed person’ or a ‘person with blue eyes’, and nobody objects to either descriptor. It is only when someone has decided that the characteristic being referred to is negative that suddenly people want to separate it from the person.²

Identity-first language can also represent a neurodiverse perspective on autism. The counterpart, dubbed the neurotypical person, represents a typically developing person (typical brain wiring without a neurological difference), who constitutes the majority of population and is conceptualised as the norm. The term neurotypical is widely used by the autism community and has been also listed on the National Autistic Society website as an instance of appropriate terminology to be used. While it has not attained official status in the scientific literature, it has been widely used by researchers to describe typically developing individuals. In this book, I will also adopt the term neurotypical, partly because of its convenience (compared with the rather wordy construction, typically developing individual/person/people) but also because I do not dispute that differences can have neurological underpinnings. However, I intend to show how matters of communication are essentially matters of communication and interaction (as opposed to explaining them away with reference to neurology), yet this does not mean incompatibility with the idea of neuro -diversity.

Third, while deficits or impairments in communication and social interaction have been in the vanguard of autism literature, I will distance myself from such assumptions. While certain behaviours associated with autism might be atypical or different in the sense that they do not occur to the same extent in neurotypical individuals, such deviations from the behavioural norms are often valued nega -tively.³ This is especially striking in the discourse revolving around autism inter -vention that sees autism as a condition to be treated. Rocque (2009) associates the common use of terms such as ‘fighting’, ‘combating’ and ‘curing’ autism with ‘words usually mobilized in reference to fatal illnesses or mortal enemies’. How autism is talked about thus hinges on divergent paradigms or world views about autism, including the ideas about who needs to change and how. In this book, my dissatisfaction relates to assumptions that terms such as deficit or impairment carry specifically about autistic persons while overlooking the contributions of their social partners. However, as these terms occur throughout the book, they are mainly used in reference to literature where researchers or clinicians align with those assumptions. I hope that readers remain mindful the that notions about impair ments and deficits have also historical and theoretical importance, and they are needed for points of discussion and dialogue. In this book, they provide a backdrop against which to consider new ways of understanding autism.

Why gaze matters: conventional wisdom and scholarly work

Questions about gaze, communication and human sociality have been of interest in numerous different disciplines, including literature, arts, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, human–computer interaction, neuroscience and, as notable in this book, psychology. In the following sections, I will consider a selection of work from this diverse field to set the scene for what is to come from a multimodal inter -action perspective and an interactional tradition, the study of structures and practices of human social interaction (see Chapter 2). The conventional wisdom about eye contact might be a good place to start. This can provide us with some indication of what kinds of qualities or social norms we often associate with gaze, and whether these hold up for scrutiny.

Much credence has been given to the idea that we can simply ‘read’ someone, their thoughts and emotions, from their eyes – as the familiar proverb, ‘the eyes are the window of the soul’, suggests. Think about the diverse language we use every day to describe gaze, as James Gibson and Anne Pick exemplify below:

He caught my eye, or held my eye, or looked me up and down, or his eyes dropped or flickered, or his gaze wandered. A person may either cast an eye on, or fasten his eyes on, or look down his nose at. He may steal a glance, give a sidelong glance, or a guarded glance, or have a discerning glance, a piercing glance, or a fixed stare. He may also give one a sly look, an open look or a black look.

(Gibson & Pick, 1963, pp. 386–7)

That the qualities of gaze, say how someone looks at another person, convey different communicative intent has been often taken as an example of ‘body language’. Yet the notion of body language can be misleading in suggesting an underpinning ‘code’ for gaze behaviours, body movements, postures and proxemics. With so many options available, ranging from conveying confidence or honesty to flirting (and the list is by no means exhaustive), one might be left wondering how to determine this ‘code’: what it is about each time that, say, an instance of gaze occurs. Even the body language expert, Judi James (2008), warns against such simplistic mapping and suggests that studying bodily signals should entail ‘taking each movement and gesture and then evaluating it in the context of other move -ments, not isolating them in a “one size fits all” way’ (p. 3). In this book, I will not talk about body language nor isolate gaze from the interactions in which it occurs. Rather, I will talk about multimodal interaction that considers the context in which an instance of gaze occurs, such as what has been said or done, and how another person responds to gaze.

The duration of eye contact is another idea capitalised on in many books on body language (e.g. Ellsberg, 2010). The familiar etiquettes instruct us, for instance, to give eye contact in conversations to show that we are listening, or to look at our audience so as to appear confident, honest and persuasive during public speaking. Suggestions are often made about the quantity of gaze, as Melinda Wenner Moyer (2016) writes in Scientific American:

There’s a reason your mother told you to look people in the eye when you talk to them: eye contact conveys important social cues. Yet when someone holds your gaze for more than a few seconds, the experience can take on a different tenor.

The ‘recipe’ for eye contact offered in body language books usually instructs people to break mutual gaze every three seconds (to show interest but to not stare). The figure is drawn from experimental research findings, such as the study recently reported by Nicola Binetti and colleagues (2016) in Royal Society Open Science. The researchers presented participants video clips of an actor looking at the camera for different durations (ranging from a tenth of a second to just over ten seconds). While participants were watching the clips, their pupil dilation was recorded, and after each clip they had to say whether the length of eye contact was felt too long or too short to be comfortable. On average, participants preferred approximately three seconds of eye contact; hence the secret number of three picked up by body language experts. However, while such findings are intriguing, observing video recordings of faces does not quite correspond to diverse social exchanges in the real world. Think again of the idea of context and the three-second rule when I alternate my gaze like the instruction tells me to, and my three-second ‘look’ lands on your eyes the moment after you have asked me a question. My gaze is likely to be interpreted differently depending on what else is happening: say, whether or not I have answered your question as I look into your eyes. These are just the sorts of issues that I will consider in this book, and provide foundations for in Chapter 2.

Gaze in different scholarship

Let us consider briefly how different scholarly disciplines have engaged with ques -tions about gaze. By introducing some ideas from the arts, philosophy and sociology, I mean not to complicate the terrain explored, but to illustrate that conventional understanding and talk about gaze can begin to seem deceptively simple. The eyes, perception and sight have had particular importance in Western culture (Classen, 1997). For instance, the eyes, gaze and seeing have been associated with socially virtuous qualities such as ‘clarity’, ‘intellect’ and ‘truth’ (e.g. Pallasmaa, 1996, p. 15). Many complex reflections about gaze can be found in the philo -sophical writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the arts, literature and media studies, gaze has been related to the representation of gender, identity and social relations. For instance, in Ways of Seeing, the art critic, John Berger (1972), considers how images and paintings are not simply being looked at, but the process is impacted by ‘a whole series of learnt assumptions’ (p. 11) about what is beautiful, truthful, tasteful and so on. This brings to fore the relationship between an observer and who (or what) is being observed. A film theorist, Laura Mulvey (2003, originally published in 1975) famously used the term ‘male gaze’ to discuss how women are portrayed as an object of gaze in films. This objectification is accomplished by the camera work – ‘cinema builds the way she is to be looked at’ (p. 52). The ‘gaze’ of a camera has also implications beyond cinema, and in Chapter 2, I will consider its significance in the context of video-based social research: what a camera enables us to ‘see’ and what its limitations are.

Gaze has also featured in sociological writings on power. The French philo -sopher and historian, Michel Foucault, wrote about the ‘panopticon’ in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977 [1975]): the all-seeing eye that has the potential to alter the behaviour of those who think they are being watched. The idea of the panopticon draws on the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a cylindrical prison design that incorporates a watchtower in the middle. This design exposes inmates visible to guards but leaves the guards invisible to the inmates. Through...