The potential of eye-tracking as a sensitive measure of behavioural change in response to intervention

One challenge to the development of effective interventions to support learning and behavioural change in neurodevelopmental disorders is a lack of suitable outcome measures. Eye-tracking has been used widely to chart cognitive development and clinically-relevant group differences in many populations. This proof-of-concept study investigates whether it also has the potential to act as a marker of treatment effects, by testing its sensitivity to differential change over a short period of exposure to an iPad app in typically developing children. The app targets a key skill in early social communication development, by rewarding attention to people, operationalised via a finger-tap on screen. We measured attention to images taken from the app, and a selection of matched stimuli to test generalisation of effects, at baseline and two weeks later. Children were assigned to either an app-exposure or no-app condition in the intervening period. The app exposure group showed increases in fixation on people for images from the app, and for distant-generalisation photographs, at high levels of complexity. We conclude that, with careful selection of stimuli, eye-tracking has the potential to make a valuable contribution to the range of outcome measures available for psycho-behavioural interventions in neurodevelopmental disorders.