Eye-tracking Based Markers For Autism In Young Children

Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD)is a developmental disorder that occurs in the early stage of an individual and involves sensory perception,emotion,language,thinking and behaviors.The early diagnosis of ASD can help to have intervention and treatment much earlier.However,among all of the previous studies looking for biomarkers for ASD,The indicators of eye movement are considered to be the most likely effective and sensitive marker for early identification of ASD.Current eye-tracking studies showed that abnormal social visual attention preference patterns may be an effective and sensitive biomarker for early identification of ASD.However,little research has been explored the differences between individuals with ASD and Typical Developing Children(TD)using different paradigms and the sensitivity of such differences to core symptoms of ASD.Especially in Chinese children,there are few studies on the visual attention preference patterns of individuals with ASD.Dynamic Visual Attention Preference Task(dancing Chinese children or adults video VS dynamic geometry video)and Abstract Point Visual Detection Task(walking human or cat video VS scrambled point-light video)used in this study are two typical eye tracking paradigms that have been widely recognized.69 subjects participated in the experiment(35 children with ASD and 34 TD).Using the Two-sample T-test,the difference of the proportion of total fixation time/the proportion of fixation counts in each region of interests between ASD Group and TD Group was explored,and the correlation between the proportion of total fixation time/proportion of fixation counts in the region of interest and the severity of symptoms of ASD was further explored.In the Dynamic Visual Attention Preference Task,the proportion of total fixation time/the proportion of fixation counts on dancing individual video for ASD Group is significantly shorter than that TD Group,and the less visual preference for dancing individual video is related to social affect score on ADOS-2.In the Abstract Point Visual Detection Task,compared with the TD Group,the ASD Group showed visual attention preference for moving cat,and the ASD Group showed no difference in visual attention pattern for cat and human,while the TD Group showed different visual attention patterns for cat and human.Given the above,the results of this study show that although both tasks can beused to distinguish ASD children from TD children,Dynamic Visual Attention Preference Task have more efficient and accurate indicators than Abstract Point Visual Detection Task,and this indicators are related to social affect on ADOS-2,so this task is expected to develop into a tool for evaluating social function defects in ASD,thus providing an objective indicators for assessing of social function in ASD.