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In addition to difficulties in attention disengagement seen in ASD, attention atypicalities have been particularly evident in people with autism in the context of face processing, often with less attention directed to faces (e.g., BEHRMANN; THOMAS; HUMPHREYS, 2006; RIBY; HANCOCK, 2009). Many studies have documented reduced eye movements towards faces in people with autism, showing increased eye gaze towards the mouth and less to the eye area (PELPHREY et al., 2002; KLIN et al., 2002). Bird et al. (2006) conducted a fMRI study investigating the modulation of attention in participants with ASD towards houses and faces. ASD participants showed diminished attention modulation towards social stimuli, but not houses. These results indicate a lack of salience for social stimuli, such as faces, in individuals with autism (BIRD et al., 2006). Riby and Hancock (2009) used an eye-tracking experiment measuring spontaneous eye gaze towards faces embedded in scenes and found that participants with ASD showed reduced gaze towards faces (measured in fixation length) in comparison to TD controls, which the authors linked to a lack of interest in the social information. In this task, an "incongruent" face was inserted in a typical image of a scene (incongruent here meaning a face being inserted in a manner that does not typically occur). ASD participants were not captured by the incongruent-social element as controlled, suggesting an underlying atypical attentional mechanism in how participants with autism responded to images including faces when these are also distracting incongruent elements. In a review of the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in face processing in autism, Behrmann et al. (2006; BEHRMANN; THOMAS; HUMPHREYS, 2006), argued that face processing impairments occur due to core perceptual alterations, possibly due to an atypical attentional bias to local features of stimuli that could be combined with the social disinclination seen in ASD.