Positive Correlation Between Global and Fine Social Perception in Children with ASD: An Eye-Tracking Study

Background: Social perception deficits are one of the main clinical characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). During the last decade, eye-tracking methodology has allowed an objective and quantitative characterization of these deficits.

Objectives: In this study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between two levels of social perception in children with ASD; global social perception, measured using a preferential viewing eye-tracking paradigm (Pierce et al. 2011), and fine social perception, measured using a social scenes eye-tracking paradigm (Saitovitch et al. 2016).

Methods:  Twenty-six children with ASD (five girls, age = 10.3 ± 3.3) and thirty-nine typically developing (TD) children (thirteen girls, age = 9.5 ± 2.4) participated in this study. ASD diagnosis was based on DSM-IV-R and ADI-R criteria. Tobii T120 eye-tracker was used to measure gaze behavior during two eye-tracking paradigms: a social scenes paradigm and a preferential viewing paradigm. In the social scenes paradigm, participants were presented with movie fragments displaying social scenes with characters engaged in peer to peer social interactions. The number of fixation to the face and eyes of characters was compared between groups, controlling for gender and age. In the preferential viewing paradigm, participants were presented with a movie consisting of dynamic geometric images (DGI) and dynamic social images (DSI) displayed side-by-side simultaneously on the screen. The number of fixation to the DSI was compared between groups, controlling for gender and age. Finally, a correlation analysis was performed between the number of fixation in the face and eyes of characters in the social scenes paradigm and the number of fixation in the DSI in the preferential viewing paradigm.

Results: In the social scenes paradigm, statistical analysis showed significant reduced fixations to the face (p < 0.001) and to the eyes (p < 0.001) in ASD group compared to TD group. In the preferential viewing paradigm, significant reduced fixations in DSI was observed in ASD group compared to TD group (p<0.001). Correlation analysis showed a significant positive correlation between the number of fixations in the face during the visualization of social scenes and the number of fixations in the DSI in the preferential viewing paradigm (p<0.05) in children with ASD. Indeed, ASD children who looked less to the faces of characters were the ones who presented less preference for social movement. No correlation was observed in the TD group.

Conclusions: Taken together, these new results seem to indicate that abnormalities in the global process of preference for social movement over geometric movement would be associated with abnormalities in the process of face perception in ASD. Furthermore, these results may suggest that the more fine and complex social perception deficits in ASD could be predicted by more global social perception deficits.