Comparing Attention to Socially-Relevant Stimuli in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Developmental Coordination Disorder

Abstract

Difficulties with social interaction have been reported in both children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD), although these disorders have very different diagnostic characteristics. To date, assessment of social skills in a DCD population has been limited to paper-based assessment or parent report. The present study employed eye tracking methodology to examine how children attend to socially-relevant stimuli, comparing 28 children with DCD, 28 children with ASD and 26 typically-developing (TD) age-matched controls (aged 7–10). Eye movements were recorded while children viewed 30 images, half of which were classed as ‘Individual’ (one person in the scene, direct gaze) and the other half were ‘Social’ (more naturalistic scenes showing an interaction). Children with ASD spent significantly less time looking at the face/eye regions in the images than TD children, but children with DCD performed between the ASD and TD groups in this respect. Children with DCD demonstrated a reduced tendency to follow gaze, in comparison to the ASD group. Our findings confirm that social atypicalities are present in both ASD and to a lesser extent DCD, but follow a different pattern. Future research would benefit from considering the developmental nature of the observed findings and their implications for support.

Comorbidity Matters: Social Visual Attention in a Comparative Study of Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Their Comorbidity

“…In the current analysis, latency to isolated faces in ASD participants was similar to TD, replicating previous findings. Particularly, in a comparable study including social images of different social complexity, children with ASD spent a similar amount of time as TD to first fixate to the face AOI (70). In our study, the latency of attention to a group of faces was additionally FIGURE 2 | Results of the mixed effects analysis for the region of faces.…”

“…Areas of Interest (AOIs) were delineated for every picture annotating the whole image and differentiating the following categories: face, body and non-social, the latter including all nonsocial elements of the stimulus (i.e., objects). This categorization on naturalistic scenes, including images of people during an interaction, has been used in previous studies (70). Eye tracking measurements were exported for each subject and AOI from the SMI Software and heatmaps offixation duration were generated for quality control.…”

“…Additionally, two latency variables were investigated for the face AOIs (in seconds) (70). Firstly, the "latency to first face fixation", defined as the time required until the first fixation to a face AOI.…”

Social Visual Perception Under the Eye of Bayesian Theories in Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Advanced Modeling of Spatial and Temporal Parameters

“…Linear mixed effects models were applied separately for each gaze variable and each ROI category similar to (46) using the statistical software R (R Core Team, v 3.6.1) and the lme4 library (v 1. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. In general, the patient group was the main effect term of interest.…”

“…Such paradigms have been widely investigated and particularly eye tracking provides insights about the underlying mechanisms of the social understanding in autism spectrum disorder (12,13). On the one hand some studies report that participants with autism spectrum disorder prefer looking to non-social in comparison to social stimuli (14) and less to faces compared to non-face parts of a social scene (15). Moreover, regarding atypicalities in following the gazes of others, deficits in joint attention have been shown in participants with autism spectrum disorder (16).…”