No or limited eye contact is one of the major sign that your child has autism. I am just wondering why kid with autism avoiding eye contact. Because of my curiosity, I have read different article about autism and eye contact relationship. My son is also have limited eye contact and thanks to his occupational therapist because my son is improving in terms of eye contact.
According to some study, a kid with autism has difficulty making eye contact due to in part of the brain process visual information rather than social deficit. A child with autism showed activity over a larger area of the brain’s cortex when an image was placed in the periphery of their visual field, compared with when the image was placed in the center of their visual field according to live science.
One study on 2013 says that children with autism are likely to have a reduced ability to control their eye movements. Another 2005 study found out that seeing other people’s faces triggered a threat response in individual with autism.
According to Remrov, an artist and autistic savant, it feels unnatural and that it’s difficult for her to measure how long to hold eye contact with a person. “When I’m having a conversation with someone, [if] I would make eye contact, I would miss everything that person is saying,” she said.
Making eye contact triggers a kind of sensory overload, making it too difficult to focus on the actual content of the conversation.