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. 2021 Oct;51(10):3492-3505.
doi: 10.1007/s10803-020-04812-w. Epub 2021 Jan 2.

Distance from Typical Scan Path When Viewing Complex Stimuli in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and its Association with Behavior

Elena J Tenenbaum #  1   2   3 , Samantha Major #  4 , Kimberly L H Carpenter  4   5   6 , Jill Howard  4 , Michael Murias  4   7 , Geraldine Dawson  4   5   6
Affiliations

Distance from Typical Scan Path When Viewing Complex Stimuli in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and its Association with Behavior

Elena J Tenenbaum et al. J Autism Dev Disord. 2021 Oct.

Abstract

Eye-tracking is often used to study attention in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous research has identified multiple atypical patterns of attention in children with ASD based on areas-of-interest analysis. Fewer studies have investigated gaze path, a measure which is dependent on the dynamic content of the stimulus presented. Here, rather than looking at proportions of looking time to areas of interest, we calculated mean fixations frame-by-frame in a group of typically developing children (36 to 72 months) and determined the distance from those typical fixations for 155 children with ASD (27-95 months). Findings revealed that distance from the typical scan path among the children with ASD was associated with lower communication abilities and greater ASD symptomatology.

Keywords: Autism; Communication; Eye-tracking; Social attention.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest: Dr. Dawson is on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Janssen Research and Development, Akili, Inc, LabCorp, Inc, Roche Pharmaceutical Company, and Tris Pharma, and is a consultant to Apple, Gerson Lehrman Group, Guidepoint, Inc, Axial Ventures, Teva Pharmaceutical, and is CEO of DASIO, LLC. Dr. Dawson has received book royalties from Guilford Press, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature Press. In addition, Dr. Dawson has the following patent applications: 1802952, 1802942, 15141391, and 16493754. Dawson and Carpenter helped develop technology for early screening for ASD. The technology has been licensed and Dawson, Carpenter, and Duke University have benefited financially. Dr. Howard reports personal fees from Roche.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Screen captures from video during each of the four segment types. Mean TD path shown in blue, mean ASD path in red. Shaded red and blue regions show standard deviation.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Mean distance for ASD participants from “typical” scan path by video segment.
Figure 3:
Figure 3:
Mean distance from “typical” scan path averaged across ASD participants over the 180 second video.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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