Eye-Tracking Measure of Responsiveness to Joint Attention: Validity and Clinical Usefulness With Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Falck-Ytter et al. 2012 ASD RJA Falck-Ytter et al. 2012 RJA RJA Navab et al. 2012 Joint attention is one predictor of later social-communication behaviors of children with autism spectrum disorder. In the present study, joint attention behavior was divided into 2 categories: initiating joint attention (IJA), including the child's pointing, and responsiveness to joint attention (RJA), including gaze-following and pointing-following. Recently, research on eye-tracking responsiveness to joint attention in babies and toddlers has increased. However, we found few published studies that established the validity of eye-tracking assessment as a measure of responsiveness to joint attention. The present study evaluated the validity of an eye-tracking measure of responsiveness to joint attention by analyzing relations between eye-tracking measures and measures of joint attention, language skills, and symptoms of autism as reported by the parents of 60 young children with developmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder. The correlations between the measures of parent-reported joint attention and the eye-tracking measures of responsiveness to joint attention were statistically signifıcant. The present study thus supports the validity of eye-tracking measures of responsiveness to joint attention. The correlations among the eye-tracking measures of responsiveness to joint attention and the children's reported language skills and symptoms of autism were statistically signifıcant, even when chronological age and developmental age were controlled. Eye-tracking may provide a useful measure of joint attention in young children, especially of responsiveness to joint attention, and may enable early detection of autism spectrum disorder in young children.

Effects of the Picture Exchange Communication System on Early Social-Communication Behaviors in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…We based our use of stimuli movies (Fig. 1) and RJA evaluation on a previous study, which found that eye-tracking provides a useful measure of RJA (Nagai, Hinobayashi, & Kanazawa, 2017b). Each stimulus began with a scene of a female model sitting behind a table and facing the camera.…”

“…e principal measurement of gaze-following determined whether the rst eye-movement saccade from the head toward an object during the gaze-following condition step or the point-following condition step moved toward the object at which the model looked at (correct responsiveness) or toward the other object (incorrect responsiveness). We then analyzed the gaze behaviors by using both an "area of interest (AOI)" setting and a "gaze plot" function to judge whether the participants' gaze xation moved from the model (RJA cue) to the toy (object of the Figure 2 shows the AOI setting and visual angle for each condition, following Nagai, Hinobayashi, and Kanazawa, (2017b). We also used AOI analysis tools to calculate where and for how long the participants xed their eye gaze in each step.…”