Heterogeneity In The Visual Behavior Of Children With Autism Reading Electronic Picture Books

Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder with complex and heterogeneous symptoms.There is no specific medicine to treat its core symptoms,and prognosis needs to be improved through long-term educational interventions.With the continuous advancement of digital technology and the popularity of portable devices,electronic picture books with multimedia elements can attract the attention of children with autism and increase their interest and participation in learning.Therefore,it would be helpful to use electronic picture books for educational interventions for children with autism.Current research suggests that analyzing the heterogeneity of children with autism can help educators develop individualized educational programs based on individual behavioral characteristics,thereby improving the effectiveness of educational interventions.However,the research on electronic picture book educational interventions has not yet considered the heterogeneity of children with autism.To address this issue,this paper uses eye-tracking technology to analyze the heterogeneity of children with autism reading electronic picture books from the perspective of visual behavior.The details are as follows:(1)Heterogeneity of visual attention to social information in children with autism.In this paper,the temporal and spatial eye movement indicators of both protagonist and emotional interest areas were extracted from the eye movement data as feature parameters,and the subgroups of children with autism were classified using the K-means clustering method,and the subgroups of children with autism and normally developing children were compared and analyzed using analysis of variance.The results showed that there was heterogeneity in the visual attention of children with autism reading electronic picture books,and two types of subgroups were obtained.One subgroup showed lower visual attention to social information compared with normally developing children,while the other subgroup showed higher or no difference in visual attention to social information.Different educational interventions were suggested for the two types of visual attention to improve children’s comprehension of social information in electronic picture books.(2)Heterogeneity of eye-movement trajectories of children with autism.This paper proposes an eye-movement behavior trajectory analysis method,in which the eyemovement trajectory data with spatial and temporal characteristics are processed by eyemovement trajectory drifting point processing method,time slicing and eye-movement behavior coding to obtain eye-movement behavior trajectory data,and the Scan Match algorithm is used to construct an eye-movement behavior trajectory similarity network,and the community discovery algorithm is used to analyze the heterogeneity of eyemovement behavior trajectories of autistic children.The results showed that there was heterogeneity in the trajectories of eye-movement behaviors of children with autism,and the children’s attention was affected by the difficulty of electronic picture books,combined with the co-occurrence matrix analysis method to find the attention subgroups of children with autism reading electronic picture books of different difficulty levels,obtaining five types of attention subgroups: scattered attention,focused attention,partially scattered attention,low difficulty scattered attention and high difficulty scattered attention.Different educational interventions were suggested for the attention characteristics of the five types of children with autism to improve their attention when reading electronic picture books.This paper provides new ideas and methods for analyzing the heterogeneity in visual behaviors of children with autism reading electronic picture books,and provides suggestions and inspiration for educators to use electronic picture books for educational interventions and electronic picture book design,which can help improve the effectiveness of educational interventions for children with autism.