The Effect Of Gaze Direction On Eye Processing In Autistic Children

Since the eyes containing rich non-verbal stimulus,get information from the eyes ofothers plays a major role in the human social activities.Eye gaze direction conveys muchinformation about the internal states of social partners.In particular,mutual gaze is animportant signal of another’s interest and intentions towards the perceiver;it serves toestablish a communicative context.Except the direct gaze processing, the averted gazeprocessing also affect the understand and judgment of the social information in the socialactivities.Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder with the social disorder as the coresymptoms.Atypical processing of eye contact is one of the significant characteristics ofindividuals with autism.The existing researches have shown,in person with autism,theresponses to straight gaze were stronger than responses to averted gaze;whereas,some hasshown that As with the typically developing children,the children with autism,were faster andmore efficient to detect direct gaze than averted gaze.In order to explore the characteristic of the autistic children in sensing and processingthe gaze direction, this paper has selected fourteen children with and without autistic agedfrom three to eight years, and they were made to watch thirty face pictures which containdifferent direction of gaze through the eye tracking technology; follow to explore wether theface has affected the autism children to explore the different direction of gaze, forty picturesthat the eyes were presented alone and forty schematic eye stimuli were given.The results are as follow:(1) compared to the normal children, the autistic childrenhave obviously spent less time on detecting eyes than the normal children but the time onwatching mouth is practically no difference.(2) gaze processing is unaffected by faces inautism children, eyes as the sole social stimulation have caused high physiological arousal inautism individuals and cause avoid the straight sight.(3) Autism children were different indetecting direct gaze and averted gaze,were slower to detect and less to look direct gaze thanaverted gaze, but the strabismus degree does not affect the eye processing in autismchildren.(4)The autism children were hurt in gaze following.(5) the more serious damage in social, the more preferences for mouth and the more time on detecting eyes and mouth inautistic children.The degree of the language impairment, was negatively correlated to thetime on watching face and eyes.