Journal
AUTISM RESEARCH
Volume 8, Issue 5, Pages 620-628Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/aur.1479
Keywords
social attention; autism spectrum disorder; eye-tracking; social motivation; methodology; face processing
Categories
Funding
- Pennsylvania Department of Health (SAP) [4100047863]
- National Institute of Mental Health [RC1MH08879]
- Fondation Roger de Spoelberch [ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC]
- [ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSLstar]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by social impairments that have been related to deficits in social attention, including diminished gaze to faces. Eye-tracking studies are commonly used to examine social attention and social motivation in ASD, but they vary in sensitivity. In this study, we hypothesized that the ecological nature of the social stimuli would affect participants' social attention, with gaze behavior during more naturalistic scenes being most predictive of ASD vs. typical development. Eighty-one children with and without ASD participated in three eye-tracking tasks that differed in the ecological relevance of the social stimuli. In the Static Visual Exploration task, static images of objects and people were presented; in the Dynamic Visual Exploration task, video clips of individual faces and objects were presented side-by-side; in the Interactive Visual Exploration task, video clips of children playing with objects in a naturalistic context were presented. Our analyses uncovered a three-way interaction between Task, Social vs. Object Stimuli, and Diagnosis. This interaction was driven by group differences on one task onlythe Interactive task. Bayesian analyses confirmed that the other two tasks were insensitive to group membership. In addition, receiver operating characteristic analyses demonstrated that, unlike the other two tasks, the Interactive task had significant classification power. The ecological relevance of social stimuli is an important factor to consider for eye-tracking studies aiming to measure social attention and motivation in ASD. Autism Res2015, 8: 620-628. (c) 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available