Developmental changes in attention to social information from childhood to adolescence in autism spectrum disorders: a comparative study.
Toru Fujioka, Kenji J Tsuchiya, Manabu Saito and 17 others
PMID 32272970WHAT IT FOUND
In autism, eye gaze fell after around 10 years while mouth gaze rose; typical children showed the opposite pattern.
In scenes with people and shapes, autistic children looked less at people than typical children did.
Key findings
01In face videos without mouth motion, eye-region attention declined sharply in the ASD group after around 10 years and rose constantly in the TD group after around 5 years; mouth-region attention moved in opposite directions.
02In the preference paradigm, TD participants gazed longer at the people region than ASD participants did.
03Biological motion and the social region in finger-pointing did not show significant main effects or interactions.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was cross-sectional, so it compared different children at different ages. It cannot show that the same child changed gaze over time. The ASD group had small numbers in each age band, especially 19 in the 0-5-year group, and the TD 12-18-year group had only 37 participants. The groups were not perfectly matched in age within some bands, and age, sex, and diagnosis differences may have affected some comparisons. Diagnosis did not use gold-standard ADOS or ADI-R measures. Typical development participants were screened mainly by questionnaire and local checkups, not by a full diagnostic evaluation, and IQ was not measured in them. All participants were Japanese, and previous work cited in the paper says Japanese participants may look at eyes longer than British participants, so culture may matter. The paper did not measure anxiety or other factors that could explain the gaze changes.
Declared interests
The supplied text reports funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development. It does not state any author competing interests or who wrote the manuscript.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat the around-age-10 drop in eye gaze as proof that autism causes a worsening social deficit. The study was cross-sectional, did not measure anxiety or other explanatory factors, and cannot show why the gaze pattern changed.