Attention during social interaction in children with autism: Comparison to specific language impairment, typical development, and links to social cognition

Abstract

Eye-tracking studies have shown how people with autism spend significantly less time looking at socially relevant information on-screen compared to those developing typically. This has been suggested to impact on the development of socio-cognitive skills in autism. We present novel evidence of how attention atypicalities in children with autism extend to reallife interaction, in comparison to typically developing (TD) children and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). We explored the allocation of attention during social interaction with an interlocutor, and how aspects of attention (awareness checking) related to traditional measures of social cognition (false belief attribution). We found divergent attention allocation patterns across the groups in relation to social cognition ability. Even though children with autism and SLI performed similarly on the socio-cognitive tasks, there were syndrome-specific atypicalities of their attention patterns. Children with SLI were most similar to TD children in terms of prioritizing attention to socially pertinent information (eyes, face, awareness checking). Children with autism showed reduced attention to the eyes and face, and slower awareness checking. This study provides unique and timely insight into real-world social gaze (a)typicality in autism, SLI and typical development, its relationship to socio-cognitive ability, and raises important issues for intervention.

Brief Report: Patterns of Eye Movements in Face to Face Conversation are Associated with Autistic Traits: Evidence from a Student Sample

“…However, only a small number of studies to date have used eye-tracking to assess patterns of visual attention during naturalistic face-toface interactions in relation to autism or autistic traits. The findings of these studies are as follows: young children with ASD spent less time fixating a social partner's face compared to their typically developing peers during a live interaction (Hanley et al, 2014;Noris et al, 2012). No reduction in time spent looking at a social partner's face during a live interaction was found in pre-adolescents with high-functioning autism (Nadig et al, 2010).…”

The use of eye-tracking to explore social difficulties in cognitively able students with autism spectrum disorder: A pilot investigation

“…Recently, eye-tracking has been used during real face-to-face social interaction with children who have autism. Thus, Hanley et al (2014) monitored gaze during a social interaction and explored links to social understanding in 17 primary school-aged children with autism compared to children with 14 language impairments and 16 TD children. Atypical gaze behaviour by children with autism (e.g.…”

Gaze performance during face-to-face communication: A live eye tracking study of typical children and children with autism

“…Only a handful live eye-tracking studies have been published so far involving children with ASD (Falck-Ytter, Carlströ m, & Johansson, 2015;Hanley et al, 2014;Nadig, Lee, Singh, Bosshart, & Ozonoff, 2010;Noris, Nadel, Barker, Hadjikhani, & Billard, 2012). One reason why so few studies of this type have been conducted may be that eye-tracking experiments involving live person-to-person interaction can be more methodologically challenging and time consuming than conventional (screenbased) eye tracking (Gredebä ck, Fikke, & Melinder, 2010;Risko, Laidlaw, Freeth, Foulsham, & Kingstone, 2012).…”