Visual Preference for Biological Motion in Children and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study

Dzmitry A Kaliukhovich,Matthew S Goodwin,Andrew Skalkin,Frederick Shic,Matthew Boice,Nikolay V Manyakov,Robert Hendren,Seth Ness,Geraldine Dawson,Gahan Pandina,Bennett Leventhal,Abigail Bangerter

doi:10.1007/s10803-020-04707-w

Abstract

Participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (n = 121, mean [SD] age: 14.6 [8.0] years) and typically developing (TD) controls (n = 40, 16.4 [13.3] years) were presented with a series of videos representing biological motion on one side of a computer monitor screen and non-biological motion on the other, while their eye movements were recorded. As predicted, participants with ASD spent less overall time looking at presented stimuli than TD participants (P < 10–3) and showed less preference for biological motion (P < 10–5). Participants with ASD also had greater average latencies than TD participants of the first fixation on both biological (P < 0.01) and non-biological motion (P < 0.02). Findings suggest that individuals with ASD differ from TD individuals on multiple properties of eye movements and biological motion preference.

Highlights

Infants typically show an early visual preference for the movement of other human beings (Blake and Shiffrar 2007; Simion et al 2008)
Analysis of covariance revealed a significant effect of participant group on all metrics, except “% time the first fixation was on biological motion” (Supplementary Table 1)
In comparison to the typically developing (TD) group, the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) group spent significantly less time looking at stimuli that depicted biological as opposed to non-biological motion (% preference for biological motion; ASD vs. TD, mean: 54.5% vs. 61.9%; Cohen’s d = 0.87, ηp2 = 0.14, P < 10–5)

Summary

Introduction

Infants typically show an early visual preference for the movement of other human beings (Blake and Shiffrar 2007; Simion et al 2008). This attention and orientation to biological motion may be heritable, and could be a precursor to development of socio-cognitive abilities (Wang et al 2018). Other studies have found that reduced visual sensitivity to biological motion is maintained into adulthood indicating a continuation of deficits, not necessarily detected by visual preference tasks for socially relevant information (Kaiser et al 2010). There are indications that intelligence quotient (IQ) can impact perception of biological motion and may moderate responses in ASD (Rutherford and Troje 2012)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion