Attention control in autism: Eye-tracking findings from pre-school children in a low- and middle-income country setting.
A five-minute portable antisaccade eye game spots autism-linked attention gaps in Indian preschoolers without a lab.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lockwood Estrin et al. (2024) used a small, portable eye-tracker to run an antisaccade game with preschoolers in India.
Kids with autism and typically developing peers sat on a caregiver’s lap while the screen flashed cues.
The task measured how well children could look away from a sudden light and toward the opposite side.
What they found
The eye-tracker spotted clear group differences in attention control and learning.
Children with autism showed a different looking pattern than their peers during the game.
The tool worked outside a fancy lab, making it usable in low-resource clinics or homes.
How this fits with other research
KAgiovlasitis et al. (2025) later used the same eye-tracking gear with Indian adults. They saw that more autistic traits meant less looking at social pictures, extending the preschool finding to older ages.
Nayar et al. (2017) ran a lab-based Kanizsa task and found kids with autism missed global shapes. Georgia’s portable antisaccade task builds on that work by bringing the test to the field.
Shic et al. (2023) used a 5-minute social attention eye-tracking task in US labs. Both studies show eye gaze can flag autism, but Georgia’s setup is cheaper and needs no lab.
Why it matters
You can pack this antisaccade game in a backpack and get objective attention data in minutes. Use it for quick screening or to track progress during early intervention. No big budget, no dark room—just a laptop and a sticker on the screen.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The development of cognitive processes, such as attention control and learning, has been suggested to be altered in children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. However, nearly all of our understanding of the development of these cognitive processes comes from studies with school-aged or older children in high-income countries, and from research conducted in a controlled laboratory environment, thereby restricting the potential generalisability of results and away from the majority of the world's population. We need to expand our research to investigate abilities beyond these limited settings. We address shortcomings in the literature by (1) studying attention control and learning in an understudied population of children in a low- and middle-income country setting in India, (2) focusing research on a critical younger age group of children and (3) using portable eye-tracking technology that can be taken into communities and healthcare settings to increase the accessibility of research in hard-to-reach populations. Our results provide novel evidence on differences in attention control and learning responses in groups of children with and without a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. We show that learning responses in children that we assessed through a portable eye-tracking task, called the 'antisaccade task', may be specific to autism. This suggests that the methods we use may have the potential to identify and assess autism-specific traits across development, and be used in research in low-resource settings.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2024 · doi:10.1177/13623613221149541