Autism
Do looking patterns explain face recognition skills in autism?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Children who spend more time looking at faces rather than objects have better face-recognition skills, regardless of whether they have autism.
Key findings
More time spent looking at faces relative to objects predicted better face-processing scores, although this relationship represented a small effect. Surprisingly, there was no significant difference between the autism group and control group in how long they looked at faces versus objects. Both groups looked at objects 63% of the time and faces 37% of the time, showing a strong preference for high-salience objects.
Methodology
Researchers tracked the eye movements of 110 children and adolescents, including 60 with autism spectrum disorder and 50 typically developing controls. While their gaze was recorded, participants watched twelve 15-s trials displaying four silent videos simultaneously, containing high-salience and low-salience faces and objects. The researchers also measured participants' face-recognition and expression-matching abilities to see how social attention relates to performance.
Limitations
The study's cross-sectional design cannot show whether looking at faces actually causes better face recognition to develop over time. Additionally, the non-social object videos (like trains and bulldozers) may have been too highly appealing, which might have masked looking differences between the groups. Finally, participants had to meet a high eyetracking data quality threshold of 80% to be included, which might have excluded children with more severe symptoms.
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