Do minimally verbal and verbally fluent individuals with autism spectrum disorder differ in their viewing patterns of dynamic social scenes?

Attending preferentially to social information in the environment is important in developing socio-communicative skills and language. Research using eye tracking to explore how individuals with autism spectrum disorder deploy visual attention has increased exponentially in the past decade; however, studies have typically not included minimally verbal participants. In this study, we compared 37 minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder with 34 age-matched verbally fluent individuals with autism spectrum disorder in how they viewed a brief video in which a young woman, surrounded by interesting objects, engages the viewer, and later reacts with expected or unexpected gaze-shifts toward the objects. While both groups spent comparable amounts of time looking at different parts of the scene and looked longer at the person than at the objects, the minimally verbal autism spectrum disorder group spent significantly less time looking at the person's face during the episodes where gaze following-a precursor of joint attention-was critical for interpreting her behavior. Proportional looking-time toward key areas of interest in some episodes correlated with receptive language measures. These findings underscore the connections between social attention and the development of communicative abilities in autism spectrum disorder.