Different Eye Tracking Patterns in Autism Spectrum Disorder in Toddler and Preschool Children

Xue-Jun Kong; Zhen Wei; Binbin Sun; Yiheng Tu; Yiting Huang; Ming Cheng; Siyi Yu; Georgia Wilson; Joel Park; Zhe Feng; Mark Vangel; Jian Kong; Guobin Wan

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2022.899521

Different Eye Tracking Patterns in Autism Spectrum Disorder in Toddler and Preschool Children

Front Psychiatry. 2022 Jun 9:13:899521. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.899521. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Xue-Jun Kong¹, Zhen Wei², Binbin Sun², Yiheng Tu³, Yiting Huang³, Ming Cheng³, Siyi Yu³, Georgia Wilson³, Joel Park³, Zhe Feng², Mark Vangel⁴, Jian Kong³, Guobin Wan²

Affiliations

¹ Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.
² Department of Child Psychiatry and Rehabilitation, Shenzhen Maternity and Child Healthcare Hospital, Southern Medical University, Shenzhen, China.
³ Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.
⁴ Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.

Abstract

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been observed to be associated with fixation abnormality as measured eye tracking, but the dynamics behind fixation patterns across age remain unclear.

Materials and methods: In this study, we investigated gaze patterns between toddlers and preschoolers with and without ASD while they viewed video clips and still images (i.e., mouth-moving face, biological motion, mouthing face vs. moving object, still face picture vs. objects, and moving toys).

Results: We found that the fixation time percentage of children with ASD showed significant decrease compared with that of TD children in almost all areas of interest (AOI) except for moving toy (helicopter). We also observed a diagnostic group (ASD vs. TD) and chronological age (Toddlers vs. preschooler) interaction for the eye AOI during the mouth-moving video clip. Support vector machine analysis showed that the classifier could discriminate ASD from TD in toddlers with an accuracy of 80% and could discriminate ASD from TD in preschoolers with an accuracy of 71%.

Conclusion: Our results suggest that toddlers and preschoolers may be associated with both common and distinct fixation patterns. A combination of eye tracking and machine learning methods has the potential to shed light on the development of new early screening/diagnosis methods for ASD.

Keywords: autism; eye tracking; machine learning; percentage of fixation time; preschool; support vector machine; toddler.