Perception of Other People's Attention Direction in Typically Developing Children and Children With Autism : An Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

An important social skill is to monitor other people’s gaze to find out what catches their attention. Direct gaze alternated with raised eyebrows is an ostensive cue that make typically developing infants more interested in looking at the object attended to by another person. In the current study, we focused on the sensitivity to such cues in two groups of typically developing (TD) children (infants and preschoolers) as well as preschool children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It is known that children with ASD fixate differently than TD children, and this fixation tend to be rendered in social settings. The aim was to study the early markers of ASD, the deviant sensitivity to follow the gaze of other people. With eye tracking, the effect of ostensive cues versus a neutral condition was investigated in a gaze following paradigm. We predicted that the children with ASD would find the social cues difficult to follow, and that this would be rendered in their fixation pattern. The findings in the current study indicate a different fixation pattern of which TD infants and ASD children attended less to the objects in the ostensive condition, than in the neutral condition. The opposite effect was found in the TD preschoolers. These findings contradict the findings of previous research, which suggested that infants depend on ostensive cues when following gaze of other people.