Abstract
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) orient less to socially salient stimuli, such as dynamic social images, than typically developing children. In turn, this lack of social orienting is thought to impair affected individuals’ socio communicative development. Here, we aim to explore the relationship between time spent on dynamic social images and ASD behaviors, such as joint attention and communication, in preschoolers on the autism spectrum. In this study, social orienting is measured using eye-tracking during a task consisting of side-by-side presentations of dynamic social images and dynamic geometric images. The side of the screen where each type of video was presented alternated between items to avoid visual perseveration from influencing the location of participants’ first fixations. Visual exploration patterns recorded during the task from 33 preschoolers with ASD were compared with those of 27 typical developing (TD) children. Additionally, we quantified joint attention behaviors and used standardized parent reports to measure communication. We observed reduced orienting to dynamic social images in preschoolers with ASD compared to TD children. Also, ASD participants went to the dynamic social images less frequently for their first fixations. However, we observed great heterogeneity within the ASD group. ASD preschoolers who spent more time on the dynamic social images also presented more pronounced visual engagement with the dynamic social images (longer mean fixation duration and fewer saccades per second). Moreover, in the ASD group, more time spent on dynamic social images correlated with increased frequency of joint attention behaviors, which in turn correlated with improved communication skills. Our results support reduced social orienting in children with ASD, which correlated with their visual exploration patterns. Further, reduced orienting to the social world in young children with ASD is related to socio communicative deficits and should, therefore, be a focus of intervention programs as early as possible.
Highlights
The intrinsic ability to orient to our surrounding social environment has been found to be impaired in very young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) [1,2,3]
We designed a Dynamic Social Images task (DSI-TASK), inspired from the task proposed by Pierce et al [18], that we recently described in another paper [23] and in which 16 participants with ASD and 9 Typically developing (TD) children from the present study were included
The percentage of time spent on dynamic social images (DSI) was 45.0% (S.D. = 19.7) in the ASD group, which means that, on average, children with autism spent more time (55.0%) looking at dynamic geometric images (DGI)
Summary
The intrinsic ability to orient to our surrounding social environment has been found to be impaired in very young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) [1,2,3]. Research in the field of autism has demonstrated that young children who go on to be diagnosed with ASD show important differences very early on when responding to socially salient cues. Retrospective video analysis demonstrates that compared to their TD counterparts, children who are later diagnosed with autism focus less frequently on people and faces during their early years [9]. This hypothesis is further supported by a study showing that attention to the eyes of a face declines between the ages of two and six months in infants at-risk for developing autism [10]
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