Brief Report: Broad Autism Phenotype in Adults is Associated with Performance on an Eye-Tracking Measure of Joint Attention

Abstract

The current study takes advantage of modern eye-tracking technology and evaluates how individuals allocate their attention when viewing social videos that display an adult model who is gazing at a series of targets that appear and disappear in the four corners of the screen (congruent condition), or gazing elsewhere (incongruent condition). Data demonstrated the feasibility of administrating this experimental paradigm to a diverse sample of healthy adult college students (N = 44). Results revealed that individual differences in gaze allocation were significantly related to a self-report measure evaluating features of the broad autism phenotype, suggesting that individual variation in the broad autism phenotype is related to individual differences in gaze allocation.