ArticleBiological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging2025
Spatiotemporal Eye Movement Dynamics Reveal Altered Face Prioritization in Early Visual Processing Among Autistic Children.
Article in Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Implicit processing of basic facial expressions in young children with autism: an eye-tracking study.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Differing patterns of face processing in infants at elevated likelihood of autism.Infant behavior & development · 2025Article
- Intrinsic Functional Connectivity Alterations of the Fusiform Face Area in Autism Spectrum Disorder.NeuroSci · 2025Article
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14 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundReduced social attention-looking at faces-is one of the most common manifestations of social difficulty in autism that is central to social development. Although reduced social attention is well characterized in autism, qualitative differences in how social attention unfolds across time remains unknown.
methodsWe used a computational modeling (i.e., hidden Markov modeling) approach to assess and compare the spatiotemporal dynamics of social attention in a large, well-characterized sample of children with autism (n = 280) and neurotypical children (n = 119) (ages 6-11) who completed 3 social eye-tracking assays at 3 longitudinal time points (baseline, 6 weeks, 24 weeks).
resultsOur analysis supported the existence of 2 common eye movement patterns that emerged across 3 eye-tracking assays. A focused pattern was characterized by small face regions of interest, which had high a probability of capturing fixations early in visual processing. In contrast, an exploratory pattern was characterized by larger face regions of interest, with a lower initial probability of fixation and more nonsocial regions of interest. In the context of social perception, children with autism showed significantly more exploratory eye movement patterns than neurotypical children across all social perception assays and all 3 longitudinal time points. Eye movement patterns were associated with clinical features of autism, including adaptive function, face recognition, and autism symptom severity.
conclusionsDecreased likelihood of precisely looking at faces early in social visual processing may be an important feature of autism that is associated with autism-related symptomology and may reflect less visual sensitivity to face information.
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