Relationships Between Eye Tracking and Functional Outcomes in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is marked by social dysfunction with a wide range of impairment. Deficits in visual attention have been identified as a key mechanism involved in observed social difficulties. Children with ASD typically do not attend to pertinent areas when viewing social interactions, and therefore do not obtain crucial information for social learning. Over the course of development, this leads to compounding difficulty in acquiring and learning from social situations. Eye tracking studies provide a window into the child’s visual attention that allows researchers to precisely identify what is being attended to. This dissertation includes three studies that examine visual attention in children with ASD through eye tracking studies. In the first study, I use a combination of eye tracking and a simple language measure to discriminate between ASD and related disorders. Linear discriminant analyses were used to demonstrate that eye tracking and language variables were able to differentiate groups at a comparable level to standard measures of autism. The second study uses eye tracking variables (i.e., proportion of time that attention is focused on the eyes) to longitudinally predict specific areas of social dysfunction. That is, it is proposed that deficits in visual attention mechanistically lead to social deficits, which results in observed behaviors that typify ASD which are most accurately predicted by eye tracking variables early in development (compared to non-core symptoms of ASD). Consistently, the variables best predicted by eye tracking at an early age were those at the core of ASD (i.e., eye contact, gaze integration, joint attention). Finally, in the third study, eye tracking variables are used to understand more nuanced social behaviour. Specifically, according to the Social Information Processing model, children with ASD first have difficulty encoding information (operationalized as eye tracking variables in this study), which leads to difficulties with interpretation (i.e., children’s understanding of the situation). Generally, the pattern of results was consistent: those children, typically developing or with ASD, who attended the least to informative areas formed the most problematic interpretations. These three studies highlight the impact of eye tracking on social dysfunction in ASD.