Promoting social attention in 3-year-olds with ASD through gaze-contingent eye tracking.
Quan Wang, Carla A Wall, Erin C Barney and 4 others
PMID 31468735WHAT IT FOUND
Brief eye-tracking training helped toddlers with autism keep looking at faces during videos, while untrained peers lost interest.
This suggests the tool can sustain attention to social cues in a lab setting, but it does not yet prove benefits for real-world interaction.
Key findings
01After training, children with ASD who received gaze-contingent cues looked significantly more at faces than those who did not, while the untrained group showed a decline in face looking.
02Children with lower nonverbal ability showed the greatest benefit, maintaining their attention to faces better than higher-ability peers after training.
03The intervention was feasible, with a low dropout rate of 11% and no evidence that the visual cues caused aversion or reduced overall attention to the screen.
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 a preliminary efficacy and feasibility trial with a small sample size (35 children with ASD). The outcome measured was looking at a face on a screen, not real-world social interaction or language development. The training was very brief (two 15-minute sessions), so it is unknown if effects last over time. The control condition did not include a 'sham' cueing system, so it is unclear if the benefit came specifically from the gaze-contingency or just from the visual spotlighting effect. Participants were recruited from a university clinic, which may limit generalizability to community settings.
Declared interests
The authors reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest, except for one author who is an employee of Cogstate and another who is a consultant for Janssen and Roche.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume this eye-tracking tool will improve your patients' actual social skills or language use. The study only proved it can keep toddlers looking at a face on a screen for a short time, not that it transfers to real-life interactions or long-term development.