Unraveling the developmental dynamic of visual exploration of social interactions in autism
- University of Geneva, Switzerland
- Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico
- Fondation Pôle Autisme, Switzerland
- Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates
- Bosch Sensortec GmbH, Germany
Abstract
Atypical deployment of social gaze is present early on in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Yet, studies characterizing the developmental dynamic behind it are scarce. Here we used a data-driven method to delineate the developmental change in visual exploration of social interaction over childhood years in autism. Longitudinal eye-tracking data were acquired as children with ASD and their typically developing (TD) peers freely explored a short cartoon movie. We found divergent moment-to-moment gaze patterns in children with ASD compared to their TD peers. This divergence was particularly evident in sequences that displayed social interactions between characters and even more so in children with lower developmental and functional levels. The basic visual properties of the animated scene did not account for the enhanced divergence. Over childhood years, these differences dramatically increased to become more idiosyncratic. These findings suggest that social attention should be targeted early in clinical treatments.
Data availability
The Proximity Index method code and example data are publicly available at (https://github.com/nadakojovic/ProximityIndexMethod (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10409645) and the data and codes used to produce figures of the current paper can be accessed at https://github.com/nadakojovic/ProximityIndexPaper (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10409651).
Article and author information
Author details
Holger Franz Sperdin
Funding
National Centre of Competence in Research SYNAPSY (51NF40-185897)
- Marie Schaer
Swiss National Science Foundation (163859)
- Marie Schaer
Swiss National Science Foundation (190084)
- Marie Schaer
Swiss National Science Foundation (202235)
- Marie Schaer
Swiss National Science Foundation (212653)
- Marie Schaer
ERC Synergy fund BrainPlay - The Self-teaching Brain grant (810580)
- Daphné Bavelier
Fondation Privée des Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève (https://www.fondationhug.org
- Marie Schaer
Fondation Pôle Autisme
- Marie Schaer
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Christian Büchel, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany
Ethics
Human subjects: The study protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Medicine of Geneva University, Switzerland (Swissethics, protocol 12-163/Psy 12-014, referral number PB_2016-01880). All families gave written informed consent to participate.
Version history
- Preprint posted: September 17, 2020 (view preprint)
- Received: December 15, 2022
- Accepted: December 1, 2023
- Accepted Manuscript published: January 9, 2024 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 19, 2024 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2024, Kojovic et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Unraveling the developmental dynamic of visual exploration of social interactions in autism
eLife 13:e85623.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.85623
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