Dr. Elina Birmingham
Social interactions form the vast majority of our daily activities, and successful navigation of these interactions requires a variety of social skills. While most of us take our social skills for granted, some children, such as those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), have difficulty forming relationships with their peers and tend to be misunderstood by their classmates and teachers. While the development of social skills is highly complex, at a fundamental level it is supported by mechanisms of visual attention and perception. My recent work has focused on how children, adolescents, and adults with ASD attend to and make sense of social information. In particular, while most typically developing individuals show a bias to attend to the eyes of other people when interpreting social situations, this bias is less obvious in individuals with autism, and in some cases it is absent altogether. In addition to exploring relationships between attention, perception, and everyday social functioning, I have begun to observe and describe individual differences in these mechanisms, which may be particularly relevant for our understanding of ASD as a spectrum condition. My overarching goal is to understand how attention operates in service of the individual to support social interactions in everyday environments.