Atypical gaze patterns in children and adults with autism spectrum disorders dissociated from developmental changes in gaze behaviour

Abstract

Eye tracking has been used to investigate gaze behaviours in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, traditional analysis has yet to find behavioural characteristics shared by both children and adults with ASD. To distinguish core ASD gaze behaviours from those that change with development, we examined temporo-spatial gaze patterns in children and adults with and without ASD while they viewed video clips. We summarized the gaze patterns of 104 participants using multidimensional scaling so that participants with similar gaze patterns would cluster together in a two-dimensional plane. Control participants clustered in the centre, reflecting a standard gaze behaviour, whereas participants with ASD were distributed around the periphery. Moreover, children and adults were separated on the plane, thereby showing a clear effect of development on gaze behaviours. Post hoc frame-by-frame analyses revealed the following findings: (i) both ASD groups shifted their gaze away from a speaker earlier than the control groups; (ii) both ASD groups showed a particular preference for letters; and (iii) typical infants preferred to watch the mouth rather than the eyes during speech, a preference that reversed with development. These results highlight the importance of taking the effect of development into account when addressing gaze behaviours characteristic of ASD.

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

“…The nature of this finding is different to the reduced attention to faces often observed in children with autism (e.g. Klin et al 2002;Nakano et al, 2010;Riby & Hancock, 2008), but is in-line with recent findings that observed no overall reduction in eye-region viewing in older, high functioning individuals with autism when only one face or person was present in the each visual stimulus (Fletcher-Watson et al 2009;Freeth et al 2010). Findings from this new cohort of participants replicated previous findings, from Freeth et al (2013a) and Laidlaw et al (2011), using equipment enabling a much more finegrained temporal and spatial analysis of eye-movements compared to these previous studies and indicate that individuals with more autistic traits are focussing on socially relevant areas within their visual field as much as individuals who show fewer autistic traits, providing the opportunity to effectively spot and process any subtle social cues that may be produced by the social partner.…”

“…Children with ASD are often found to look less to other people's faces compared to typically developing children, the eye region in particular (Klin et al, 2002;Nakano et al, 2010;Riby & Hancock, 2008). Some adult studies have also reported reduced looking to the eyes in individuals with ASD (e.g.…”

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

“…Hosozawa, Tanaka, Shimizu, Nakano and Kitazawa (2012) and Nakano et al (2010) have made this comparison between autism and SLI by comparing gaze data to the same dynamic social stimuli across two studies. The first study (Nakano et al, 2010) involved children and adults with autism and typical controls, and the second (Hosozawa et al, 2012).…”

“…The first study (Nakano et al, 2010) involved children and adults with autism and typical controls, and the second (Hosozawa et al, 2012). involved children with SLI and typical controls.…”

“…A range of eye tracking studies have shown how people with autism attend atypically to social stimuli (still images of faces or social scenes; clips of dynamic social interaction), mainly in terms of reduced attention to the eyes and faces of others (Corden et al, 2008;Pelphrey et al, 2002;Riby & Hancock, 2009a;Riby & Hancock, 2009b;Frazier Norbury et al, 2009;Klin, Jones, Schultz, Volkmar & Cohen, 2002b;Nakano et al, 2010). When attention is allocated to a face, it seems that it is directed to the mouth region for an atypically increased time compared to individuals who do not have autism and this may be an indicator of reliance upon speech and language to understand social interactions (Jones et al, 2008;Klin et al, 2002b).…”