Autism Children’s Joint Attention Of Faces In Socialized Scenes: Eye-tracking And Gazing Training

Autism is clinically diagnosed as impaired socialization and communicative abilities in the presence of restricted patterns of behavior and interests. The existing studies have found that autism adolescent and adult prefer looking at bodies but avoid looking at faces when scanning social scenes with adults. This paper distinguish the different state of social scene, focusing on comparing visual scanning pattern in familiar social scenes with familiar own-age children between the preschool children group with autism and the control group of normal development of children. Then we designed the gazing training program, and tested the results. Study one provides children in one of the four different social status to find out the differences and similarities of children between the two groups when scanning social scenes. On the basis of study one, study two provides a visual cognitive function training plan, and tested if the intervention of children’s visual scenes and faces information can improve autistic children’s missing cognition processing ability on the social function.In study one, we presented the two groups with social scenes, and when they began the passive viewing task we recorded their patterns by using tobii. The result showed that:(1) ASDs spent more fixation time ratio and fixation count ratio on faces than controls. ASDs spent equal time ratio and count ratio on faces and bodies while the controls spent more time ratio and count ratio on faces than bodies;(2) Both the groups spent less time ratio and count ratio on faces looking at other people in the pictures.(3) The controls spent more time ratio on faces looked by other children while ASDs didn’t.(4) Both the groups spent least time ratio on bodies of the children who looked at others and also were looked by others. However the controls spent increased time ratio on faces in this social status while ASDs didn’t show any time increase on these faces. In total, ASDs didn’t show face preference like the controls, they didn’t distinguish faces from bodies. Face has become a deep processing area like “expertise area” for the controls while ASDs failed to get the same expertise skills; The controls spent less time on people looking at others while more time on the faces looked by others, they show normal joint attention ability. However ASD children decreased time on face looking at others while failed to increase time on faces looked by others, they have the ability to detect gaze sight but failed to show following to target object.In study two, we provided a visual game with a large number of faces for ASDs to help them receiving face contact, understanding, and interactive training(two hours a day, 7 days training). We used scene viewing task before training and after training with tobii recorded their visual pattern. The result showed that:(1) After short-term training, the effect of instructions remarkable increased, ASD spent more time ratio and more count ratio on people in these pictures, suggesting that short-term training may improve ASDs’ understanding of language hint.(2) After language hint training, the transfer path between body and the objects in front of child in pictures increased significantly.Generally speaking, ASDs didn’t show face preference like the controls, they didn’t distinguish faces from bodies. And they have the ability to detect gaze sight but failed to show following to target object. The training plan increase ASDs’ fixation ratio on bodies not on faces; Besides, with language hint, their transfer path between body and the objects increased significantly, suggesting that our training program to a certain extent, improved their understanding of the meaning of gaze direction in the scene. If subsequent research put into training in the same direction, and appropriately increase the training time, the ASDs would probably attain a higher level of social function.