Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, 113 Moore Building, University Park, 16802, USA.
Department of Human Development and Family Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, USA.
Sci Rep. 2024 Jan 5;14(1):619. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-51332-z.
A core feature of autism involves difficulty perceiving and interpreting eye gaze shifts as nonverbal communicative signals. A hypothesis about the origins of this phenotype is that it emerges from developmentally different social visual attention (SVA). We developed Social Games for Autistic Adolescents (SAGA; Scherf et al. BMJ Open 8(9):e023682, 2018) as a serious game intervention for autistic individuals to discover the significance of eye gaze cues. Previously, we demonstrated the effectiveness of SAGA to improve the perception and understanding of eye gaze cues and social skills for autistic adolescents (Griffin et al. JCPP Adv 1(3):e12041, 2021). Here, we determine whether increases in social visual attention to faces and/or target gazed-at objects, as measured via eye tracking during the same Gaze Perception task in the same study sample, moderated this improvement. In contrast to predictions, SVA to faces did not differentially increase for the treatment group. Instead, both groups evinced a small increase in SVA to faces over time. Second, Prior to the SAGA intervention, attention to faces failed to predict performance in the Gaze Perception task for both the treatment and standard care control groups. However, at post-test, autistic adolescents in the treatment group were more likely to identify the object of directed gaze when they attended longer to faces and longer to target objects. Importantly, this is the first study to measure social visual attention via eye tracking as a treatment response in an RCT for autism. NCT02968225.
自闭症的一个核心特征是难以感知和解释眼神转移，将其视为非言语交际信号。关于这种表型起源的一个假设是，它源于发育上不同的社会视觉注意力（SVA）。我们开发了自闭症青少年社会游戏（SAGA；Scherf 等人，BMJ Open 8(9):e023682, 2018），作为一种针对自闭症个体的严肃游戏干预措施，旨在让他们发现眼神线索的重要性。此前，我们已经证明了 SAGA 可以有效改善自闭症青少年对眼神线索的感知和理解能力以及社交技能（Griffin 等人，JCPP Adv 1(3):e12041, 2021）。在这里，我们确定在相同的研究样本中，通过同一注视感知任务的眼动追踪来测量的社会视觉注意力对面孔和/或目标注视物体的增加是否调节了这种改善。与预测相反，治疗组的面部 SVA 并没有增加。相反，两组的面部 SVA 随着时间的推移都有小幅度的增加。其次，在 SAGA 干预之前，治疗组和标准护理对照组的注意力都无法预测注视感知任务的表现。然而，在测试后，治疗组的自闭症青少年在注视更长时间的面孔和更长时间的目标物体时，更有可能识别出注视的物体。重要的是，这是第一项通过眼动追踪测量社会视觉注意力作为自闭症 RCT 治疗反应的研究。NCT02968225。
