Photos taken by autistic people and neurotypicals differ

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People with autism have social difficulties and this manifests in simple psychological tests – for example, if you ask them to look at photographs of faces, they will typically spend less time looking at the eye region. But what about if we turned things around and asked autistic people to take photographs of other people – what might this reveal?

That’s exactly what a team of US researchers has done for a small study in Current Biology, and they found autistic people chose to take “strikingly different” kinds of photograph from neurotypical controls – for example, they took fewer photographs of people posing, facing the camera, and more repetitive photographs of objects. Tellingly, people with autism actually took more photographs of other people than did the controls, challenging the mistaken notion that all autistic people are unsociable and uninterested in others.

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/10/26/ph ... uing-ways/

Ive taken more photo's of animals that anything else

Oh I remember this project.
The researcher gave me hundreds of photos for me to guess if autistic or neurotypical people took each set of ~30 photos.
I found the sets indistinguishable and could not do this task because it was really boring to look at photos of the same offices and the outside of one building on campus.

Depends where you're taking photos though. If you're on some sort of tour ride, you mostly take pictures of the scenary you're looking at.

I never really thought about it but I almost never take pictures of people. Almost all of my pictures are of things or animals. I remember, when I was young, I used to line up presents or things I found interesting and take pictures of them. Most people would probably find the majority of my photos extremely boring (and then wonder why I took them in the first place).

I like the idea behind this study. It's a nice way of looking at an issue from an unexpected direction that might uncover information otherwise hidden

Interesting. When I take photos with my children in it, I make sure to show their faces so that way when they get older, they might want to see old photographs of them and other people might want to see old pictures of them so they would want to know what they looked like when they were little. I also include the background because I find it so boring to only see people. The whole point of a photo is to see where they are at. When I was a kid, I mostly took photos of things when I had my own camera when we went on a summer trip. Now as a parent I want to make memories of my family so I include my children. When I went to London, I was taking movies of things than people and my mom got mad at me when I was filming a sign at the Burlington Arcade and then I used up the whole battery taking movies of Tower of London of me walking around. I got carried away. I never thought about autism there. Just my trip there and stuff I wanted to film I felt was important.

Me too. I went on vacation to France in the summer, and took easily 100+ photos. Of those, fewer than ten had people as the picture's focus. There are a couple that have members of my family in them, but their being there was accidental, as they were standing in the way of the thing I was trying to take a picture of. I'm sure most NTs would find my photographs very boring.

I remember several occasions as a child being given a disposable camera, and upsetting my mom when most of the pictures were of objects and scenery instead of people.

I like taking scenery photos, and I think it's a hobby I should really get back into. Cellphone cameras are still crap IMO; I'm thinking of investing in an actual digital camera.

Very interesting, though the fact both groups were specifically told to take both pictures of people and pictures of objects might have effected the result.

I noticed this too - I'm interested in photography but I tend to take a lot of pictures of objects, landscapes, animals. Hardly ever of people. Maybe I just don't interact with enough of them to bother?
Also, judging from my peripheral view of social media, many people seem to take photos of others and people in situations as a form of socially showing off. Maybe autistics are less inclined to this?

I've been interested in photography since a young age, and unless I was specifically taking pictures of a family gathering or of my friends on an outing together, my pictures I choose to take have NO people in them.

I go out looking for artistic or pleasing photos to take, and none of them have people -- if there are people around, I even wait until they've deserted the spot, to take my picture.

All my photos are of (in order of volume/number) animals, landscapes or natural elements in close up, and sometimes interesting bits of architecture or structures. But mostly animals and the natural world. No people.

In the study the autistic folks were specifically asked to take pictures of people -- I wonder what the result would be if they just let them take pictures of whatever they wanted?

I once briefly knew a professional photographer who is into all that "street photography" where you actively seek out "interesting people" to photograph. When I told him I don't want people in my own pictures, he was genuinely baffled and confused. He actively sought to catch people in his images even when they were of a location primarily. To him people added life-blood to the location -- to me they just ruin a good shot, lol!

It's been known for a long time that Autistic and introverted people are drawn more to objects than people. We see it very early in the lives of Autistics as well. When they're babies they look at objects much more often than the faces of people.

I dont want this to come off the wrong way but I feel the same way you do because objects and the surrounding environment are almost always more interesting than other people.

I agree with that -- I find everything else way more interesting than the strangers around me in any given place.

Animals the most, for me.