When you look at a painting, your eyes tell two separate stories: where your gaze lands, and the order and timing in which it visits those places. Most autism eye-tracking has used photos of social scenes and tracked only the where. This study looked at art, and at both.

Autistic adults, trained artists, and neurotypical viewers each spent fifteen seconds with thirty paintings. Artists and neurotypicals turned out to view art almost identically in both space and sequence, which is itself a little surprising. Autistic viewers were the outliers, in a specific way: they covered as much of the canvas as artists did, but their timing differed, with shorter fixations, less lingering, and the least repeatable scan paths of any group. Their gaze was not especially artist-like; if anything it sat a hair closer to the neurotypical pattern.

These takeaways come from the abstract, so the paper carries the full metrics behind them.