Oculomotor behavior in children with autism spectrum disorders.
Kids with autism make extra early eye jumps—use this biomarker to double-check social-attention test results.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Caldani et al. (2020) watched the eyes of middle-school kids with and without autism.
They used a lab eye tracker while the kids looked at simple pictures.
The team counted how many super-fast eye jumps, called express and anticipatory saccades, each child made.
What they found
Kids with autism made more of these super-fast jumps than their typical peers.
Extra jumps happened even before the picture changed, showing their attention system fired early and often.
The pattern hints that the brain’s brake pedal for eye movements works differently in autism.
How this fits with other research
Gutierrez et al. (1998) saw the same thing twenty-two years earlier: autistic kids over-shoot their eyes.
Zalla et al. (2018) moved the lens to adults and found slower, weaker jumps, showing the issue lasts lifelong but changes flavor.
Ziv et al. (2024) now tops all three studies: they filmed toddlers through tweens watching movies and found the wilder the eye dance, the higher the ADOS score. Their naturalistic task may replace the sterile lab set-ups used before.
Why it matters
If a child’s eyes jump the gun during table-top tests, social attention scores may look worse than they really are.
You can slow the pace, give longer warning cues, or re-test with silent movies like Ziv et al. (2024) to cut false positives.
Share the eye-track clip with parents; seeing the extra jumps helps them grasp why their child looks “away” yet is still trying to attend.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
To identify quantitative indicators of social communication dysfunctions, we explored the oculomotor performances in subjects with autism spectrum disorders. Discordant findings in the literature have been reported for oculomotor behavior in subjects with autism spectrum disorders. This study aimed to explore reflexive and voluntary saccadic performance in a group of 32 children with autism spectrum disorders (mean age: 12.1 ± 0.5 years) compared to 32 age-, sex-, and IQ-matched typically developing children (control group). We used different types of reflexive and voluntary saccades: gap, step, overlap, and anti-saccades. Eye movements were recorded using an eye tracker (Mobile EBT®) and we measured latency, percentage of anticipatory and express saccades, errors of anti-saccades and gain. Children with autism spectrum disorders reported similar latency values with respect to typically developing children for reflexive and voluntary saccades; in contrast, they made more express and anticipatory saccades overall, as shown in paradigm testing (gap, step, overlap, and anti-saccades). Our findings support previous evidence of the atypicality of the cortical network, which is involved in saccade triggering and attentional processes in children with autism spectrum disorders.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2020 · doi:10.1177/1362361319882861