ArticleAutism : the international journal of research and practice2024
Infant responses to direct gaze and associations to autism: A live eye-tracking study.
Article in Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Home-based eye tracking for early autism screening: a scoping review of approaches, evidence, and implementation challenges.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Eye-Tracking as a Screening Tool in the Early Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Review
- Introducing the kollaR package: A user-friendly open-access solution for eye-tracking analysis and visualization.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Sit and face the world: ontogenetic adaptation in infant vocal production and visual attention during the transition to independent sitting.BMC psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
lay abstractWhen other people look directly towards us, we often respond by looking back at them, and such direct-gaze responses are important for establishing eye contact. Atypical eye contact is common in autism, but how and when this aspect of autism develops is not well understood. Here, we studied whether how much and how quickly infants respond to others' direct gaze is associated with autism in toddlerhood. We did this by measuring direct-gaze responses in a playful social interaction using live eye tracking. The study included 169 infants, of whom 129 had an elevated likelihood of developing autism due to having a first-degree family member with the condition, and 40 with typical likelihood of autism. In the elevated likelihood group, 35 were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at 3 years of age, and 94 were not. The results showed that infants in all three groups tended to increase their looking towards the adult's face after the adult looked directly at them. However, neither how much nor how quickly the infants responded to direct gaze by looking back at the adult reliably differentiated the infants with or without subsequent autism. While infants in the elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis group tended to look away quicker from faces with direct gaze than infants in the typical likelihood group, this measure did not differentiate between the two elevated likelihood groups. We interpret the results as supporting the view that atypical direct-gaze responses are not early markers of autism.
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Registered trials
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