What might account for the difficulty many autistic people have in sustaining eye gaze or visual attention?
If input from the eyes is not being properly integrated with input from the inner ears–or if the brain’s interpretation of that input is “off” — making sense out of visual information would be a pretty confusing business. A person with vestibular processing problems might see an object moving in his line of vision, but without clear vestibular information he might not be certain whether the object, his head or his whole body was doing the moving.92 Also, if the vestibular nuclei are not responding efficiently to inner ear feedback and adjusting the eyes and neck to compensate for head and body movements, looking might well be off-putting. A person’s visual field might appear to vacillate rather than remaining steady and stable. The difficulty many autistic children have in sustaining eye gaze might also be attributable to poor proprioception from the eyeball muscles. But the primary culprit is probably poor connections. If the nuclei in the occipital lobe responsible for directing th
