Eye Movements and Behavioural Responses to Gaze‐Contingent Expressive Faces in Typically Developing Infants and Infant Siblings

Abstract

Studies with infant siblings of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder have attempted to identify early markers for the disorder and suggest that autistic symptoms emerge between 12 and 24 months of age. Yet, a reliable first‐year marker remains elusive. We propose that in order to establish first‐year manifestations of this inherently social disorder, we need to develop research methods that are sufficiently socially demanding and realistically interactive. Building on Keemink et al. [2019, Developmental Psychology, 55, 1362–1371], we employed a gaze‐contingent eye‐tracking paradigm in which infants could interact with face stimuli. Infants could elicit emotional expressions (happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger) from on‐screen faces by engaging in eye contact. We collected eye‐tracking data and video‐recorded behavioural response data from 122 (64 male, 58 female) typically developing infants and 31 infant siblings (17 male, 14 female) aged 6‐, 9‐ and 12‐months old. All infants demonstrated a significant Expression by AOI interaction (F(10, 1470) = 10.003, P < 0.001, ŋp2 = 0.064). Infants' eye movements were “expression‐specific” with infants distributing their fixations to AOIs differently per expression. Whereas eye movements provide no evidence of deviancies, behavioural response data show significant aberrancies in reciprocity for infant siblings. Infant siblings show reduced social responsiveness at the group level (F(1, 147) = 4.10, P = 0.042, ŋp2 = 0.028) and individual level (Fischer's Exact, P = 0.032). We conclude that the gaze‐contingency paradigm provides a realistically interactive experience capable of detecting deviancies in social responsiveness early, and we discuss our results in relation to subsequent infant sibling development. Lay Summary We investigated how infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder respond to interactive faces presented on a computer screen. Our study demonstrates that infant siblings are less responsive when interacting with faces on a computer screen (e.g., they smile and imitate less) in comparison to infants without an older sibling with autism. Reduced responsiveness within social interaction could potentially have implications for how parents and carers interact with these infants. Autism Res 2021, 14: 973–983. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Avatars with faces of real people: A construction method for scientific experiments in virtual reality

“…This differs from everyday social interaction, where faces are encountered as three-dimensional and highly dynamic stimuli, in diverse and meaningful contexts, and rarely occur in isolation. Some studies have attempted to address this discrepancy between the laboratory and the real world by employing videos of faces (Hermens & Walker, 2012;Keemink et al, 2020;Lander et al, 2001;O'Toole et al, 2011) or by recruiting live confederates to act as stimuli (Kemp et al, 1997;Megreya & Burton, 2008;Ritchie et al, 2020;White et al, 2014), but such approaches come with their own limitations. For instance, while pre-recorded videos display dynamic faces, these representations are seldom interactive.…”

Infants show pupil dilatory responses to happy and angry facial expressions

“…Previous work has established that infants are able to perceptually discriminate and categorise emotional expressions (Addabbo et al, 2018;Farroni et al, 2007;Keemink et al, 2019;Kotsoni et al, 2001;Nelson et al, 1979;Ruba et al, 2017;Safar et al, 2017). Evidence from eye-tracking paradigms has also shown that infants scan facial features in a similar way to adults; looking toward regions that are 'diagnostic' for decoding expressions (Hunnius et al, 2011;Keemink et al, 2021;Prunty et al, 2021;Soussignan et al, 2017). Yet how infants perceive facial expressions tells us little about whether or not they are receptive to the information communicated by expressive stimuli (Nelson, 1987;Ruba et al, 2019).…”

Infants scan static and dynamic facial expressions differently

“…Gaze-contingently activated videos also allow a standardization across trials and participants, as it ensures all infants are fixating the same location (eye-region) before the expression response begins, and guarantees their attentiveness. Similar paradigms have been used previously to simulate infant-adult social exchanges (Keemink et al, 2019;Vernetti et al, 2018), and recently to investigate infants' behavioral responses to facial expressions (Keemink et al, 2021). In this paradigm, real dynamic human faces (c.f.…”