ArticleScientific reports2017
Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 55 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
55 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 131 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Systematic Review of Brainstem Contributions to Autism Spectrum Disorder.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Bumetanide Treatment in 15 Children With Autism: A Randomised Waitlist-Control Study.Acta paediatrica (Oslo, Norway : 1992) · 2025Trial
- Bumetanide for autism: more eye contact, less amygdala activation.Scientific reports · 2018Trial
- Emotion- and Region-Specific Gaze Differences in Parents of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.Psychiatry investigation · 2026Article
- Visual function and autism spectrum disorder.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2026Review
- Applying the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health to speech-language pathology social communication interventions for autistic children and youth: A scoping review.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2026Article
- Layers of Social Meaning: Innate, Acquired, and Deliberative Levels of Referential Signal Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Treating autism with Bumetanide: Identification of responders using Q-Finder machine learning algorithm.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Restricted neural parametric modulation of emotional arousal in autism reveals a core role for the cerebellum.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Testing the relationships between facial emotion recognition, levels of Autistic traits, and eye gaze patterns.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Opposite sides of different coins: near-diametrical opposition of physiological indices of reduced accuracy of face emotion recognition in schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders.Frontiers in neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Heart rate defined sustained attention relates to visual attention in autism and fragile X syndrome.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Preserved but Un-Sustained Responses to Bids for Dyadic Engagement in School-Age Children with Autism.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- Article
- Pupil contagion variation with gaze, arousal, and autistic traits.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Autistic and non-autistic individuals show the same amygdala activity during emotional face processing.Molecular autism · 2024Article
- Visual Neurophysiological Biomarkers for Patient Stratification and Treatment Development Across Neuropsychiatric Disorders.Advances in neurobiology · 2024Review
- Toward feeling, understanding, and caring: The development of empathy in young autistic children.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2023Article
- Eye Gaze in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Review of Neural Evidence for the Eye Avoidance Hypothesis.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 4 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) seem to have difficulties looking others in the eyes, but the substrate for this behavior is not well understood. The subcortical pathway, which consists of superior colliculus, pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus, and amygdala, enables rapid and automatic face processing. A specific component of this pathway - i.e., the amygdala - has been shown to be abnormally activated in paradigms where individuals had to specifically attend to the eye-region; however, a direct examination of the effect of manipulating the gaze to the eye-regions on all the components of the subcortical system altogether has never been performed. The subcortical system is particularly important as it shapes the functional specialization of the face-processing cortex during development. Using functional MRI, we investigated the effect of constraining gaze in the eye-region during dynamic emotional face perception in groups of participants with ASD and typical controls. We computed differences in activation in the subcortical face processing system (superior colliculus, pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus and amygdala) for the same stimuli seen freely or with the gaze constrained in the eye-region. Our results show that when constrained to look in the eyes, individuals with ASD show abnormally high activation in the subcortical system, which may be at the basis of their eye avoidance in daily life.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.