A Lack of Left Visual Field Bias When Individuals with Autism Process Faces

It has been established that typically developing individuals have a bias to attend to facial information in the left visual field (LVF) more than in the right visual field. This bias is thought to arise from the right hemisphere's advantage for processing facial information, with evidence suggesting it to be driven by the configural demands of face processing. Considering research showing that individuals with autism have impaired face processing abilities, with marked deficits in configural processing, it was hypothesized that they would not demonstrate a LVF bias for faces. Eye-tracking technology was used to show that individuals with autism were not spontaneously biased to facial information in the LVF, in contrast to a control group, while discriminating facial gender.