Abstract
We report on the study of gazes, conducted on children with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD), by using a novel head-mounted eye-tracking device called the WearCam. Due to the portable nature of the WearCam, we are able to monitor naturalistic interactions between the children and adults. The study involved a group of 3- to 11-year-old children ( n=13) with PDD compared to a group of typically developing (TD) children ( n=13) between 2- and 6-years old. We found significant differences between the two groups, in terms of the proportion and the frequency of episodes of directly looking at faces during the whole set of experiments. We also conducted a differentiated analysis, in two social conditions, of the gaze patterns directed to an adult's face when the adult addressed the child either verbally or through facial expression of emotion. We observe that children with PDD show a marked tendency to look more at the face of the adult when she makes facial expressions rather than when she speaks.
Highlights
Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC, Baron-Cohen et al, 2009) encompass a set of neuro-developmental disorders that are typically manifested in childhood
There is a marked difference between the two groups: the children with ASC seem to look less at faces than typically developing (TD) children
Our results show that when presented with real-life interactions, children with autism are spontaneously attracted to facial expressions, even though to a lesser extent than TD children
Summary
Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC, Baron-Cohen et al, 2009) encompass a set of neuro-developmental disorders that are typically manifested in childhood. These are characterized by qualitative impairments in social communication and interaction and by the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviors (APA, 2000). Deficits of social attention in ASC include difficulties with orienting (i.e., shifting the attention) in response to social stimuli, especially to spoken language (O’Connor, 2012). In the literature on autism, both overt and covert orienting have been intensively studied. Overt attention orienting is visible to external observers through eye movements and head turns, covert attention orienting consists of a shift of spatial attention that cannot be directly perceived
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