Divergent Gaze Patterns in Artistic Viewing: Spatial and Temporal Signatures of Attention Across Autistic Individuals, Artists, and Neurotypical Observers

TL;DR - A free-viewing eye-tracking study comparing how autistic adults, trained artists, and neurotypical observers look at paintings, finding autistic viewing is a distinct spatial-temporal attentional profile. It matters for cognitive science and for building population-conditioned models of aesthetic attention and accessibility design.

• Three groups viewed 30 paintings (15s each); fixations extracted uniformly via a dispersion-threshold algorithm, then compared on a spatial axis (six saliency metrics: AUC-Judd, NSS, CC, SIM, KL, Information Gain) and a temporal axis (MultiMatch, ScanMatch, foveal-disc IoU/FDISS, DTW).
• Artists and neurotypicals are nearly indistinguishable spatially (density-map CC=0.96) and form the most alignable scanpath pair, while ASD gaze diverges from both.
• ASD attention is "dissociated": spatially wide like artists (high dispersion/explored area) but temporally distinct — shorter fixations, less dwell, and the least self-consistent scanpaths.
• ASD gaze is not selectively artist-like on any metric; if anything it sits marginally closer to neurotypical. Authors release all analysis code and per-stimulus results.