Development of the Methodology for Studying the Social Attention of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders by the Eye Tracking Method (Preliminary Results)

Abstract

Development of social skills is an essential condition for the habilitation of children suffering from autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The method of eye tracking (ET) opens up great opportunities for studying social attention in this contingent of people with disabilities. The aim of the study is to form a set of stimulus materials for dynamic ET-testing of eye movement patterns that are sensitive to changes in the level of social attention in preschool-age children with ASD. The selection of stimulus content included the definition of requirements for the quality of the images presented, storage and encoding of stimuli, the development of the procedure for presenting stimuli and the methodology for processing the ET-data. The stimulus material was tested on a group of healthy adults. The developed approach to the formation of standardized stimulus content for testing the social attention of children with ASD by the eye tracking method takes into account the level of children's attention to images, the degree of differences in the results of ET obtained in children of typical development and in children with ASD, as well as the intensity of the dynamics in ET indicators in improvement of clinical indicators in children with ASD.