One of the most effective means of investigating and understanding autism is eye tracking. Participants are shown photos or videos, and computer software records where their gaze rests. Autistic individuals are more likely to focus on nonsocial aspects of an image, such as objects or background patterns, while neurotypical subjects have an increased propensity to focus on people's faces.
Ralph Adolphs, the Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology and an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience, has been researching autism for decades as part of a larger project aimed at understanding the neuroscience of human social behavior. In his Emotion and Social Cognition Lab, researchers get a finer grasp on the mechanics of the brain when processing emotion and interacting with others by studying both neurotypical individuals and those who have brain damage or brain malformations or who have neuropsychiatric conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Autism is a particularly rich field for research into emotion and social cognition since it is characterized by, among other things, differences in social behavior.
Adolphs has been exploring its features by bringing adults with autism into the lab to track their eye movements when they are exposed to a variety of visual stimuli. This research has yielded many interesting findings but has been inherently limited by the expense of lab.