Visual attention toward Socially Rich context information for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Normal Developing Children: An Eye Tracking Study

The paper presents an eye tracking analysis study to help us understand the visual behavior and pattern of Normal Developing children and Autistic children while viewing a socially-rich stimulus consists of human and social interactions. An eye tracking experiment consists of displaying different images with social stimuli (containing human faces) to the child and the eye tracker captured and tracked the child's eye gaze movements, then analyzed to identify where specifically in the stimulus is the child looking at. The finding indicates a significant difference was found between the two groups viewing patterns and behavior when were presented with a scene included material with human and social interaction content. The study also reveals that large percentage of Autistic participants expressed minimum interest and time looking at face area, evident by significant time spent fixations on non-face regions, linking to lack of interest in socially relevant information, especially the two small Areas of Interests (AOIs) eyes and mouth regions comparing to the normal developing children. The results can be used to improve the life style of other children who have a risk to develop Autism as well as discover earlier signs of ASD.