What children with and without ASD see: Similar visual experiences with different pathways through parental attention strategies

The Dynamics of Looking and Smiling Differ for Young Infants at Elevated Likelihood for ASD

Social smiling is the earliest gained social communication skill, emerging around 2 months of age. From 2 to 6-months, infants primarily smile in response to caregivers. After 6 months, infants coordinate social smiles with other social cues to initiate interactions with the caregiver. Social smiling is reduced in older infants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but has rarely been studied before 6 months of life. The current study therefore aimed to understand the component parts of infant social smiles, namely look to caregiver and smile, during face-to-face interactions in 3 and 4-month-old infants at elevated (EL) and low likelihood (LL) for ASD. We found that EL and LL infants looked to their caregiver and smiled for similar amounts of time and at similar rates, suggesting that social smiling manifests similarly in both groups. A nuanced difference between groups emerged when considering temporal dynamics of looking and smiling. Specifically, 3-month-old EL infants demonstrated extended looking to the caregiver after smile offset. These findings suggest that social smiling is largely typical in EL infants in early infancy, with subtle differences in temporal coupling. Future research is needed to understand the full magnitude of these differences and their implications for social development.

Autistic young people adaptively use gaze to facilitate joint attention during multi-gestural dyadic interactions

LAY ABSTRACT

Autistic people have been said to have 'problems' with joint attention, that is, looking where someone else is looking. Past studies of joint attention have used tasks that require autistic people to continuously look at and respond to eye-gaze cues. But joint attention can also be done using other social cues, like pointing. This study looked at whether autistic and non-autistic young people use another person's eye gaze during joint attention in a task that did not require them to look at their partner's face. In the task, each participant worked together with their partner to find a computer-generated object in virtual reality. Sometimes the participant had to help guide their partner to the object, and other times, they followed their partner's lead. Participants were told to point to guide one another but were not told to use eye gaze. Both autistic and non-autistic participants often looked at their partner's face during joint attention interactions and were faster to respond to their partner's hand-pointing when the partner also looked at the object before pointing. This shows that autistic people can and do use information from another person's eyes, even when they don't have to. It is possible that, by not forcing autistic young people to look at their partner's face and eyes, they were better able to gather information from their partner's face when needed, without being overwhelmed. This shows how important it is to design tasks that provide autistic people with opportunities to show what they can do.

Conducting head-mounted eye-tracking research with young children with autism and children with increased likelihood of later autism diagnosis

BACKGROUND

Over the past years, researchers have been using head-mounted eye-tracking systems to study young children's gaze behaviors in everyday activities through which children learn about the world. This method has great potential to further our understanding of how millisecond-level gaze behaviors create multisensory experiences and fluctuate around social environments. While this line of work can yield insight into early perceptual experiences and potential learning mechanisms, the majority of the work is exclusively conducted with typically-developing children. Sensory sensitivities, social-communication difficulties, and challenging behaviors (e.g., disruption, elopement) are common among children with developmental disorders, and they may represent potential methodological challenges for collecting high-quality data.

RESULTS

In this paper, we describe our research practices of using head-mounted eye trackers with 41 autistic children and 17 children with increased likelihood of later autism diagnosis without auditory or visual impairments, including those who are minimally or nonspeaking and/or have intellectual disabilities. The success rate in gathering data among children with autism was 92.68%. 3 of 41 children failed to complete the play-session, resulting in an 86.36% success rate among 1-4-year-olds and a 100.00% success rate among 5-8-year-olds. 1 of 17 children with increased likelihood of later autism diagnosis failed to complete the play-session, resulting in a success rate of 94.11%. There were numerous "challenging" behaviors relevant to the method. The most common challenging behaviors included taking the eye-tracking device off, elopement, and becoming distressed. Overall, among children with autism, 88.8% of 1-4-year-olds and 29.4% of 5-8-year-olds exhibited at least one challenging behavior.

CONCLUSIONS

Research capitalizing on this methodology has the potential to reveal early, socially-mediated gaze behaviors that are relevant for autism screening, diagnosis, and intervention purposes. We hope that our efforts in documenting our study methodology will help researchers and clinicians effectively study early naturally-occuring gaze behaviors of children during non-experimental contexts across the spectrum and other developmental disabilities using head-mounted eye-tracking. Ultimately, such applications may increase the generalizability of results, better reflect the diversity of individual characteristics, and offer new ways in which this method can contribute to the field.