Visual Preference for Biological Motion in Children and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study
Dzmitry A. Kaliukhovich, Nikolay V. Manyakov, Abigail Bangerter, Seth Ness, Andrew Skalkin, Matthew Boice, Matthew S. Goodwin, Géraldine Dawson, Robert L. Hendren, Bennett Leventhal, Frederick Shic, Gahan Pandina
Abstract
Abstract Participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (n = 121, mean [SD] age: 14.6 [8.0] years) and typically developing (TD) controls (n = 40, 16.4 [13.3] years) were presented with a series of videos representing biological motion on one side of a computer monitor screen and non-biological motion on the other, while their eye movements were recorded. As predicted, participants with ASD spent less overall time looking at presented stimuli than TD participants ( P < 10 –3 ) and showed less preference for biological motion ( P < 10 –5 ). Participants with ASD also had greater average latencies than TD participants of the first fixation on both biological ( P < 0.01) and non-biological motion ( P < 0.02). Findings suggest that individuals with ASD differ from TD individuals on multiple properties of eye movements and biological motion preference.