Griffin Jason W, Naples Adam, Bernier Raphael, Chawarska Katarzyna, Dawson Geraldine, Dziura James, Faja Susan, Jeste Shafali, Kleinhans Natalia, Sugar Catherine, Webb Sara Jane, Shic Frederick, McPartland James C
Yale Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington.
Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging. 2025 Jan;10(1):45-57. doi: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2024.08.017. Epub 2024 Sep 3.
Reduced social attention-looking at faces-is one of the most common manifestations of social difficulty in autism that is central to social development. Although reduced social attention is well characterized in autism, qualitative differences in how social attention unfolds across time remains unknown.
We used a computational modeling (i.e., hidden Markov modeling) approach to assess and compare the spatiotemporal dynamics of social attention in a large, well-characterized sample of children with autism (n = 280) and neurotypical children (n = 119) (ages 6-11) who completed 3 social eye-tracking assays at 3 longitudinal time points (baseline, 6 weeks, 24 weeks).
Our analysis supported the existence of 2 common eye movement patterns that emerged across 3 eye-tracking assays. A focused pattern was characterized by small face regions of interest, which had high a probability of capturing fixations early in visual processing. In contrast, an exploratory pattern was characterized by larger face regions of interest, with a lower initial probability of fixation and more nonsocial regions of interest. In the context of social perception, children with autism showed significantly more exploratory eye movement patterns than neurotypical children across all social perception assays and all 3 longitudinal time points. Eye movement patterns were associated with clinical features of autism, including adaptive function, face recognition, and autism symptom severity.
Decreased likelihood of precisely looking at faces early in social visual processing may be an important feature of autism that is associated with autism-related symptomology and may reflect less visual sensitivity to face information.
社交注意力降低——注视面部——是自闭症社交困难最常见的表现之一，这对社交发展至关重要。虽然自闭症患者社交注意力降低的情况已得到充分描述，但社交注意力随时间展开的质的差异仍不明确。
我们采用计算建模（即隐马尔可夫模型）方法，对一大组特征明确的自闭症儿童（n = 280）和神经典型儿童（n = 119）（年龄6至11岁）的社交注意力时空动态进行评估和比较，这些儿童在3个纵向时间点（基线、6周、24周）完成了3项社交眼动追踪测试。
我们的分析支持在3项眼动追踪测试中出现了2种常见的眼动模式。一种集中模式的特征是关注较小的面部感兴趣区域，在视觉处理早期捕获注视点的概率较高。相比之下，一种探索模式的特征是关注较大的面部感兴趣区域，初始注视概率较低且有更多非社交感兴趣区域。在社交感知方面，在所有社交感知测试和所有3个纵向时间点上，自闭症儿童比神经典型儿童表现出明显更多的探索性眼动模式。眼动模式与自闭症的临床特征相关，包括适应功能、面部识别和自闭症症状严重程度。
在社交视觉处理早期精确注视面部的可能性降低可能是自闭症的一个重要特征，与自闭症相关症状有关，可能反映对面部信息的视觉敏感性较低。
