Scientists at Yale School of Medicine discovered that autistic two-year-olds focus significantly more on the mouths of others rather than maintaining normal eye contact. These abnormal tendencies indicate the level of the disability, according to the study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. "Our working hypothesis is that these children's increased fixation on mouths points to a predisposition to seek physical, rather than social contingencies in their surrounding world. They focus on the physical synchrony between lip movements and speech sounds, rather than on the social-affective context of the entreating eye gaze of others," said Jones, one of the study's research scientists. "These children may be seeing faces in terms of their physical attributes alone; watching a face without necessarily experiencing it as an engaging partner sharing in a social interaction."

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