17433
Limited Influence By Others' Gaze Direction on Initial Object Processing in Three-Year-Olds with Autism
The ability to follow other peoples' gaze is a key component of joint attention, and plays an important part in early development of areas such as social interaction and language. An early deficit in joint attention behavior is clinically considered a prominent feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). To identify the exact nature of this deficit has however proved difficult. Experimental studies assessing spontaneous gaze following have yielded mixed results, with some finding autistic children to display lower gaze following accuracy and others not. A recent study found that infants with later emerging socio-communicative problems, although accurate in gaze following, spent less time looking at the (by another person) attended object than did other children. This was interpreted as reflecting a failure to understand the communicative meaning of the other’s joint attention bid.
Objectives:
The aim of the present eye tracking study was to investigate gaze following in preschoolers with ASD using duration of the first fixation to the attended and unattended objects respectively as the primary measure. First fixation duration has been suggested to work as a measure of visual information acquisition, and since real life interactions are usually fast, we believe it to be a more ecologically valid measure than comparisons of total looking time.
Methods:
The study included a group of three-year olds with ASD (n=12), a control group of age matched typically developing (TD) children (n=14), as well as a group of children with other developmental delays (DD, n=9). The stimuli were videos of a female model turning to look at one out of two present objects. The subsequent analysis included measures of accuracy (i.e. the tendency to look at the same object as the model) as well as first fixation durations to the attended vs. unattended objects.
Results:
The analysis revealed no group differences in terms of accuracy, and all groups made more congruent gaze shifts than expected by change (ASD p = 0.003; DD p = 0.011; TD p = 0.005). In terms of first fixation duration, the three groups performed differently (p = 0.007). The TD and the DD groups produced longer first fixations at the attended object than did the ASD group (p = 0.04 and p = 0.002 respectively; first fixation duration at unattended object used as baseline).
Conclusions:
We found that, although accurate in gaze following, the children in the ASD group did not differentiate between the two objects in terms of first fixation duration. This suggests that initial object processing is less influenced by other people’s gaze direction in ASD. Lack of immediate allocation of processing resources to the objects others attend to may have negative impact on learning opportunities during social interaction.