Throughout childhood, children increasingly focus their attention on social aspects of their environment, such as the faces of the people around them or their interaction with them, but children with autism, on the contrary, tend to show more interest in non-social elements, such as textures or geometric shapes.
Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have studied where children look while watching cartoons and have found that in those with autism, attention does not follow the same developmental trajectory as that of typically developing children. However, everyone gradually develops their own unique attention preferences.
The results have been published in eLife and support the benefits of early interventions aimed at improving social care, which could help guide autistic children towards development patterns more similar to those of their peers without the disorder, favoring personalized support and individualized.
Exploration and interaction with the environment, keys to baby development
From birth, babies have innate abilities that are essential for their survival and adaptation, and among them is a complex attention system, especially adjusted to detect the presence of others, which is why newborns show a fascination with faces. and configurations that look like faces, especially ones that move.
This preference for biological movement is key to child development, as it serves as the primary driver of exploration and interaction with the environment and establishes the foundation for more complex social interactions. However, in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) this social attention can be affected, since ASD is characterized by repetitive behaviors and specific interests accompanied by difficulties in communication and social interactions.
Researchers used an eye-tracking device that records eye movements in real time to analyze the visual preferences of 166 children with ASD and 51 typically developing (TD) children while they freely viewed cartoons. All participants were between two and seven years old and were tested several times during their development. “Each child watched a three-minute cartoon showing a donkey in various social situations, without specific instructions. This is not a cartoon designed especially for our study, but rather one that is very popular among children in this age group,” explains Nada Kojovic, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine and first author of the study.
“These findings show how important it is that therapeutic interventions target social care at a very early stage in children with ASD, especially those with greater developmental delays.”
They observed that typically developing children focus their attention on the social interactions between characters and, as they grow older, increasingly look at the same social elements in a scene. This “synchronization” phenomenon observed in children with typical development is absent in children with ASD, who show interest in other types of stimuli, such as objects, or certain irregularities in the cartoon scenario, and over time each child with ASD develops its own unique visual preferences.
“It is likely that we can identify subgroups with common preferences among children with ASD, but there is no real synchronization of attention throughout their development, unlike what is observed in TD children. “It is the first time that a study highlights this developmental phenomenon,” said Daphné Bavelier, senior lecturer in the Psychology Section of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at UNIGE and co-author of the study.
The researchers also observed that autistic children whose gaze was more similar to that of typically developing children function better in everyday life and have better cognitive skills. And, more importantly, the way a child views a social scene, like the cartoon used here, can be used to predict future social difficulties.
“These findings show how important it is that therapeutic interventions target social care at a very early stage in children with ASD, especially those with greater developmental delays. In fact, this work shows that, if autistic children do not show interest in social interactions from the beginning, they will become increasingly disinterested in them,” explains Marie Schaer, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine. who has directed this investigation.
The UNIGE research team plans to apply their eye-tracking method to evaluate children who have benefited from a behavioral intervention known as the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) that is designed to improve communication skills in young autistic children through of playful interactions. The researchers hope that their innovative eye-tracking technique will help understand how this behavioral intervention contributes to the progress of children with ASD, providing a unique tool to improve strategies to support their development.
