Divergent Gaze Patterns in Artistic Viewing: Spatial and Temporal Signatures of Attention Across Autistic Individuals, Artists, and Neurotypical Observers

This study investigates how different populations—autistic adults (ASD), trained artists, and neurotypical observers—visually explore artworks. While previous research has established that artists and autistic individuals both tend to focus on details rather than global semantic focal points, it remained unclear whether autistic gaze patterns align more closely with the expertise-driven gaze of artists or the standard gaze of neurotypical viewers. The researchers employed a two-axis, metric-grounded framework to compare these groups: a spatial axis (analyzing fixation-density maps) and a temporal axis (analyzing the order and timing of scanpaths).

The study reveals a clear dissociation in how autistic individuals view art. Spatially, autistic viewers exhibit wide exploration patterns similar to those of trained artists, covering more area and showing less central bias than neurotypical observers. However, their temporal signature is unique: autistic participants produce the most idiosyncratic and least self-consistent scanpaths of the three groups, characterized by significantly shorter fixation durations and less total dwell time. Contrary to the hypothesis that autistic gaze might be 'artist-like,' the data show that autistic viewing is distinct from both groups, with no evidence of selective alignment with artists on any of the ten metrics tested. In contrast, artists and neurotypical observers were found to be remarkably similar in both their spatial and temporal viewing behaviors.

Understanding these divergent gaze patterns is critical for cognitive science and accessibility design. By demonstrating that autistic viewing of art constitutes a group-specific attentional profile, this research challenges the assumption that autistic attention simply mirrors other 'non-normative' viewing styles. These findings provide a foundation for developing population-conditioned models of aesthetic attention, which could lead to more inclusive designs for museums, educational materials, and digital interfaces that account for the diverse ways individuals process visual information.