These Photos Show How The World Might Look To A Person With Autism

Individuals with autism see the world through very different eyes than those who don’t have it, which impacts how they interact with their environment.

Research from Cal Tech, published online Thursday, found this is because a wide range of visual input is interpreted differently in the brain of a person with autism spectrum disorder.

“It is known that people with ASD have difficulty often figuring out how other people feel or what their social gestures mean, from looking at their faces and body postures,” Dr. Ralph Adolphs, the study’s lead author, told The Huffington Post in an email. “This may be because they pay attention to them differently.”

In other words, when a person with autism exhibits repetitive or antisocial behaviors, doesn’t make contact or has difficulty communicating — the main characteristics of the disorder — it could be because of their perception and attention focus in a given situation.

“Among other findings, our work shows that the story is not as simple as saying ‘people with ASD don’t look normally at faces,’” Adolphs said in a statement. “They don’t look at most things in a typical way.”

The researchers explored this by creating a series of images that depict how a person with autism experiences their environment. For the study the research team showed 700 images to 20 individuals with high-functioning autism and 19 control subjects, who didn’t have autism, while an eye-tracking device recorded their attention patterns on different objects within the images.

Check out the renderings below to see what the researchers discovered. 

For each pair of images, the top image shows how it is perceived by an individual with autism, while the bottom shows how it is perceived by the control subject.

In this set of images, note how the person with autism is more focused on the back of the referee’s head, rather than the player’s face.