Relative Average Look Duration and its Association with Neurophysiological Activity in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Dmitry Yu Isaev,Geraldine Dawson,David Carlson,Michael Murias,Guillermo Sapiro,Kimberly L H Carpenter,Samantha Major

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-57902-1

Dmitry Yu Isaev, Geraldine Dawson + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-57902-1

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Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by early attentional differences that often precede the hallmark symptoms of social communication impairments. Development of novel measures of attentional behaviors may lead to earlier identification of children at risk for ASD. In this work, we first introduce a behavioral measure, Relative Average Look Duration (RALD), indicating attentional preference to different stimuli, such as social versus nonsocial stimuli; and then study its association with neurophysiological activity. We show that (1) ASD and typically developing (TD) children differ in both (absolute) Average Look Duration (ALD) and RALD to stimuli during an EEG experiment, with the most pronounced differences in looking at social stimuli; and (2) associations between looking behaviors and neurophysiological activity, as measured by EEG, are different for children with ASD versus TD. Even when ASD children show attentional engagement to social content, our results suggest that their underlying brain activity is different than TD children. This study therefore introduces a new measure of social/nonsocial attentional preference in ASD and demonstrates the value of incorporating attentional variables measured simultaneously with EEG into the analysis pipeline.

Highlights

A distinctive sign of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is robust differences in the amount of attention directed toward social versus nonsocial stimuli, documented across the lifespan and reported as early as 6 months of age in infants who later develop ASD12–15
We observed a strong effect of Group, such that ASD children exhibited shorter look durations than the typically developing (TD) group (F1,177 > 35.39, p < 0.001), and of video stimulus type, with both groups most engaged in Toys and least engaged in Bubbles (F2,177 > 16.04, p < 0.001)
An interaction effect was significant (F2,177 > 3.21, p < 0.05), suggesting that relative level of engagement between Social, Toys and Bubbles was different in ASD group and TD group; in the ASD group, decreased Average Look Duration (ALD) was most evident while viewing the Social video, which was not the case for the TD group

Summary

Introduction

A distinctive sign of ASD is robust differences in the amount of attention directed toward social versus nonsocial stimuli, documented across the lifespan and reported as early as 6 months of age in infants who later develop ASD12–15. In a study of toddlers with ASD, Chawarska et al.[6] showed that the difference between total looking time at faces/objects becomes apparent only when the child was viewing child-directed speech and the actress was making eye contact, referred to as a dyadic bid In such a scene, the ASD group showed diminished attention to the face and the mouth while their attention to toys in the same scene was increased. Given the potential role of attention in influencing underlying neurophysiological activity, it is of interest to simultaneously measure both attention and EEG and jointly consider them for analysis This was done in several EEG studies in which the participant’s behavior was videotaped synchronously with EEG recording[32,33,34,35], and subsequently looking behavior (looks at the screen), as well as motor behavior (significant motion), and/or emotional behavior (crying, excessive smiling) was coded offline. Our study uses a different age range and introduces significant additional analysis both of the attentional signal (as a measure of relative responses to social vs. nonsocial stimuli) and of the EEG signal, as well as their interaction

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