Department of Psychiatry, University of Geneva, Faculty of Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland.
Department of Psychiatry, University of Geneva, Faculty of Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland; Fondation Pôle Autisme, Unité de Recherche, 4 place du Cirque, 1204, Geneva, Switzerland.
J Psychiatr Res. 2022 Dec;156:398-405. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2022.10.039. Epub 2022 Oct 21.
Altered social orienting (SO) was proposed as the primary source of socio-communicative difficulties in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eye-tracking studies generally confirm a decreased SO in ASD population. However, SO has been scarcely investigated using minimally social stimuli such as cartoons. The extent to which SO might be decreased when watching cartoons is therefore unknown. Yet, it could allow for malleable and child-friendly paradigms that could be sensitive to early atypical visual preference. In this study, 90 preschoolers with ASD (age = 3.19 ± 0 .88) and 20 TD (age = 2.95 ± 1.26) watched two eye-tracking preference tasks. One Realistic task, displaying children dancing versus geometric shapes moving repetitively and a Cartoon task, displaying social and non-social cartoon stimuli with similar movements. We measured SO percentage along with refined visual exploration parameters and compared those of ASD children to TDs. In addition, we investigated their relations with behavioral measures such as symptom severity, developmental and adaptive levels. We evidenced a decreased SO percentage in ASD compared to TD children when watching the Realistic task but not the Cartoon task. We did not identify any other between groups differences. However, we identified several correlations between eye-tracking measures and developmental as well as adaptive measures within the Cartoon task. Together, our results support a preferential orientation of children with autism towards repetitively moving shapes but no decreased SO when measured with minimally social stimuli. Nonetheless, when investigating finer visual exploration parameters, even socially simple stimuli elicited atypical gaze patterns related to early developmental delay.
社交定向改变被认为是自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）社交沟通困难的主要原因。眼动追踪研究通常证实 ASD 人群的社交定向减少。然而，使用像卡通片这样的最小社交刺激物，对社交定向的研究甚少。因此，当观看卡通片时，社交定向可能会减少到何种程度尚不清楚。然而，它可以提供灵活且适合儿童的范式，这些范式可能对早期非典型视觉偏好敏感。在这项研究中，90 名 ASD 学龄前儿童（年龄=3.19±0.88）和 20 名 TD 儿童（年龄=2.95±1.26）观看了两个眼动追踪偏好任务。一个是现实任务，显示儿童跳舞和重复移动的几何形状；另一个是卡通任务，显示具有相似动作的社交和非社交卡通刺激物。我们测量了 SO 百分比以及更精细的视觉探索参数，并将 ASD 儿童与 TD 儿童进行了比较。此外，我们还研究了它们与行为测量（如症状严重程度、发育和适应水平）的关系。当观看现实任务时，我们发现 ASD 儿童的 SO 百分比低于 TD 儿童，但在观看卡通任务时则没有。我们没有发现任何其他组间差异。然而，我们在卡通任务中发现了眼动追踪测量值与发育和适应测量值之间的几个相关性。总的来说，我们的结果支持自闭症儿童对重复移动的形状有优先定向，但在使用最小社交刺激物测量时，社交定向没有减少。尽管如此，当研究更精细的视觉探索参数时，即使是简单的社交刺激也会引起与早期发育迟缓相关的非典型注视模式。
