ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the findings and considers the future directions in the multimodal interaction research on autism. How the findings can help to rethink some of the psychological notions on gaze and more positively contribute to the understanding of social-interactional competencies in autism. The chapter offers an appraisal of the contributions of a multimodal interaction perspective to the study of autism, and proposes innovations that could lead to more interdisciplinary research on gaze. It begins with a brief recap of the findings and what they tell about gaze in interaction. The findings can also demystify social competence with respect to gaze. The chapter addresses some of the issues that are brought up when thinking about the wider potential of integrating a multimodal interaction approach in the broadly quantitatively oriented research tradition. It considers the issues of sample adequacy and scalability, then, how the approach could be extended quantitatively, even combined with experimental research.
