Intact or Impaired? Understanding Give-and-Take Interactions in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This eye-tracking study compared how 5-to 8-year-old Chinese children with ASD and typically developing peers understood reciprocal social gestures like giving and taking. Children with ASD showed intact action prediction abilities but demonstrated selective difficulties with processing the social meaning of giving gestures, suggesting deficits in top-down social processing rather than core action understanding.