Eye contact is an area for development in many individuals with social skills vulnerabilities, including the majority of such, who are not on the autistic spectrum.
Interesting statement that I'd like to hear more about. My DD has poor eye contact which I notice in these situations:
1) With us when emotions are running high (not an issue when things are positive or neutral)
2) With adults in authority or adults she does not know well. This can be VERY noticable.
I never see it with other children--ever. I have also seen the "referencing" behavior discussed, but only with parents.
DD is still what I would call socially immature, but functioning at a very high level in school and socially popular in a nerdy, gifted group.
Social skills, including eye contact, can be hyponormative in individuals with specific learning disabilities (dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, etc.), especially nonverbal learning disabilities, with language disorders (particularly expressive language), with ADHD/EF disorders, with mood or anxiety disorders, with schizotypal disorders, etc. It's a long list, obviously.
In other words, social skills are extremely complex, multifaceted skills, which can easily be affected by disruptions in any one of a multitude of functions. It's really more amazing that the majority of people function socially. (Or we could think of it the other way, that most of us (the norm) have social skills deficits, a few of us have even more deficits, and then we have a few extraordinary outliers, like HK's DD, where everything truly comes together.)
When there are additional strains on the system (e.g., emotionality/anxiety, social uncertainty, expressive language demands), some skills will naturally fall off the edge. Eye contact is one of those that tends to go. In people with EF deficits or other learning disabilities, it may also be that they have had less access to implicit instruction in social skills (from natural environmental feedback), because they've had to divert more development and processing energy to compensating for the area of learning difference.
Some individuals, with intense emotional sensitivity, also find maintaining eye contact to be too powerful of a connection with the conversational partner, and avert their eyes to keep the emotion of the interaction consistent with the level of the conversation, or to keep the net emotional level (eye contact + verbal + other nonverbal) within manageable range, so they won't be overwhelmed.
