scholarly journals Comparison of three different eye-tracking tasks for distinguishing autistic from typically developing children and autistic symptom severity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Kou ◽  
Jiao Le ◽  
Meina Fu ◽  
Chunmei Lan ◽  
Zhuo Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trial ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Biological Motion ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Social Stimuli ◽  
Visual Preference ◽  
Geometric Patterns ◽  
Social Affect

AbstractAltered patterns of visual social attention preference detected using eye-tracking and a variety of different paradigms are increasingly proposed as sensitive biomarkers for autism spectrum disorder. However, few eye tracking studies have compared the relative efficacy of different paradigms to discriminate between autistic compared with typically developing children and their sensitivity to specific symptoms. To target this issue, the current study used three common eye tracking protocols contrasting social versus non-social stimuli in young (2-7 years old) Chinese autistic (n = 35) and typically developing (n = 34) children matched for age and gender. Protocols included dancing people vs. dynamic geometrical images, biological motion (dynamic light point walking human or cat) vs. non-biological motion (scrambled controls) and child playing with toy vs. toy alone. Although all three paradigms differentiated autistic and typically developing children, the dancing people versus dynamic geometry pattern paradigm was the most effective, with autistic children showing marked reductions in visual preference for dancing people and correspondingly increased one for geometric patterns. Furthermore, this altered visual preference in autistic children was correlated with the ADOS social affect score and had the highest discrimination accuracy. Our results therefore indicate that decreased visual preference for dynamic social stimuli may be the most effective visual attention-based paradigm for use as a biomarker for autism in Chinese children. Clinical trial ID: NCT03286621 (clinicaltrials.gov); Clinical trial name: Development of Eye-tracking Based Markers for Autism in Young Children.Lay summaryEye-tracking measures may be useful in aiding diagnosis and treatment of autism, although it is unclear which specific tasks are optimal. Here we compare the ability of three different social eye-gaze tasks to discriminate between autistic and typically developing young Chinese children and their sensitivity to specific autistic symptoms. Our results show that a dynamic task comparing visual preference for social (individuals dancing) versus geometric patterns is the most effective both for diagnosing autism and sensitivity to its social affect symptoms.

scholarly journals Visual Preference for Biological Motion in Children and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dzmitry A. Kaliukhovich ◽  
Nikolay V. Manyakov ◽  
Abigail Bangerter ◽  
Seth Ness ◽  
Andrew Skalkin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Biological Motion ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
The Other ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Adults With Autism ◽  
Visual Preference ◽  
Monitor Screen

Abstract Participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (n = 121, mean [SD] age: 14.6 [8.0] years) and typically developing (TD) controls (n = 40, 16.4 [13.3] years) were presented with a series of videos representing biological motion on one side of a computer monitor screen and non-biological motion on the other, while their eye movements were recorded. As predicted, participants with ASD spent less overall time looking at presented stimuli than TD participants (P < 10–3) and showed less preference for biological motion (P < 10–5). Participants with ASD also had greater average latencies than TD participants of the first fixation on both biological (P < 0.01) and non-biological motion (P < 0.02). Findings suggest that individuals with ASD differ from TD individuals on multiple properties of eye movements and biological motion preference.

scholarly journals Autistic children do not exhibit an own-race advantage as compared to typically developing children

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 1544-1551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarina Hui-Lin Chien ◽  
Liang-Huei Wang ◽  
Chien-Chung Chen ◽  
Tzu-Yun Chen ◽  
Hsin-Shui Chen
Keyword(s):  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children

scholarly journals Context Modulates Attention to Faces in Dynamic Social Scenes in Children and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dzmitry A. Kaliukhovich ◽  
Nikolay V. Manyakov ◽  
Abigail Bangerter ◽  
Gahan Pandina
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Visual Attention ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Social Orientation ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Social Stimuli ◽  
Adults With Autism ◽  
Social Scenes

AbstractIndividuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been found to view social scenes differently compared to typically developing (TD) peers, but results can vary depending on context and age. We used eye-tracking in children and adults (age 6–63) to assess allocation of visual attention in a dynamic social orientation paradigm previously used only in younger children. The ASD group (n = 94) looked less at the actor’s face compared to TD (n = 38) when they were engaged in activity (mean percentage of looking time, ASD = 30.7% vs TD = 34.9%; Cohen’s d = 0.56; p value < 0.03) or looking at a moving toy (24.5% vs 33.2%; d = 0.65; p value < 0.001). Findings indicate that there are qualitative differences in allocation of visual attention to social stimuli across ages in ASD.ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02668991.

scholarly journals The Tilt Model Acoustic Survey of Intonation in Children with Severe Autism

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Shahla Sharifi ◽  
Zahra Azizi ◽  
Mandana Nourbakhsh
Keyword(s):  
Acoustic Survey ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Speech Pattern ◽  
Severe Autism ◽  
Tilt Model

<p>The purpose of this study is an acoustic survey of intonation in a set of declarative and interrogative sentences as uttered by 15 children with severe autism (SA) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing (TD) children. The results indicate that monotony is not a common feature in the speech pattern of all autistic children. More specifically, the results demonstrate that the monotony attributed to the autistic children’s production of speech cannot be attributable to all kinds of sentences they produce as they can produce statements and questions fairly similar to typically developing children.</p>

scholarly journals Abnormal visual attention to simple social stimuli in 4-month-old infants at high risk for Autism

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Di Giorgio ◽  
Orsola Rosa-Salva ◽  
Elisa Frasnelli ◽  
Antonio Calcagnì ◽  
Marco Lunghi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Visual Attention ◽  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Social Stimuli ◽  
Visual Preference ◽  
The Social ◽  
Visual Preferences

AbstractDespite an increasing interest in detecting early signs of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), the pathogenesis of the social impairments characterizing ASD is still largely unknown. Atypical visual attention to social stimuli is a potential early marker of the social and communicative deficits of ASD. Some authors hypothesized that such impairments are present from birth, leading to a decline in the subsequent typical functioning of the learning-mechanisms. Others suggested that these early deficits emerge during the transition from subcortically to cortically mediated mechanisms, happening around 2–3 months of age. The present study aimed to provide additional evidence on the origin of the early visual attention disturbance that seems to characterize infants at high risk (HR) for ASD. Four visual preference tasks were used to investigate social attention in 4-month-old HR, compared to low-risk (LR) infants of the same age. Visual attention differences between HR and LR infants emerged only for stimuli depicting a direct eye-gaze, compared to an adverted eye-gaze. Specifically, HR infants showed a significant visual preference for the direct eye-gaze stimulus compared to LR infants, which may indicate a delayed development of the visual preferences normally observed at birth in typically developing infants. No other differences were found between groups. Results are discussed in the light of the hypotheses on the origins of early social visual attention impairments in infants at risk for ASD.

scholarly journals Accounting for motion in fMRI: What part of the spectrum are we characterizing in autism spectrum disorder?

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Beth Nebel ◽  
Daniel Lidstone ◽  
Liwei Wang ◽  
David Benkeser ◽  
Stewart H Mostofsky ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Intellectual Ability ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
The Impact

The exclusion of high-motion participants can reduce the impact of motion in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. However, the exclusion of high-motion participants may change the distribution of clinically relevant variables in the study sample, and the resulting sample may not be representative of the population. Our goals are two-fold: 1) to document the biases introduced by common motion exclusion practices in functional connectivity research and 2) to introduce a framework to address these biases by treating excluded scans as a missing data problem. We use a study of autism spectrum disorder to illustrate the problem and the potential solution. We aggregated data from 545 children (8-13 years old) who participated in resting-state fMRI studies at Kennedy Krieger Institute (173 autistic and 372 typically developing) between 2007 and 2020. We found that autistic children were more likely to be excluded than typically developing children, with 29.1% and 16.1% of autistic and typically developing children excluded, respectively, using a lenient criterion and 80.8% and 59.8% with a stricter criterion. The resulting sample of autistic children with usable data tended to be older, have milder social deficits, better motor control, and higher intellectual ability than the original sample. These measures were also related to functional connectivity strength among children with usable data. This suggests that the generalizability of previous studies reporting naïve analyses (i.e., based only on participants with usable data) may be limited by the selection of older children with less severe clinical profiles because these children are better able to remain still during an rs-fMRI scan. We adapt doubly robust targeted minimum loss based estimation with an ensemble of machine learning algorithms to address these data losses and the resulting biases. The proposed approach selects more edges that differ in functional connectivity between autistic and typically developing children than the naïve approach, supporting this as a promising solution to improve the study of heterogeneous populations in which motion is common.

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