Social synchronization during joint attention in children with autism spectrum disorder.
Autistic kids show measurable gaze-sync delays during joint attention—use CRQA to spot subtle timing issues.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team filmed the kids with autism and 30 typical kids during a video-based joint-attention task.
They used CRQA—a math tool that tracks how two sets of eye movements line up over time.
Each child watched short clips where an adult looked at one of two toys; the camera recorded every eye shift.
What they found
Kids with autism synced their gaze shifts only a large share of the time, while typical kids hit a large share.
The autistic group also took about half a second longer to follow the adult’s look.
These timing gaps showed up even when the kids eventually looked at the right toy.
How this fits with other research
MacDonald et al. (2006) first showed we could count joint-attention acts by hand; Liu et al. (2021) now adds millisecond-level timing with CRQA.
Kourassanis-Velasquez et al. (2019) and Pérez-Fuster et al. (2022) prove joint attention can be taught; the new data gives us a sharper ruler to see if those lessons stick.
Kovarski et al. (2019) found autistic kids move their eyes faster, which seems opposite to the slower sync seen here. The difference is task type: speed tests versus social timing.
Why it matters
You can now spot tiny timing lags that old checklists miss. Add a quick CRQA scan to your intake or progress review. If the sync score stays low, pivot to peer-mediated BST or AR tools shown to work.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We explored the social synchronization of gaze-shift behaviors when responding to joint attention in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Forty-one children aged 5 to 8 with ASD and 43 typically developing (TD) children watched a video to complete the response to joint attention (RJA) tasks, during which their gaze data were collected. The synchronization of gaze-shift behaviors between children and the female model in the video was measured with the cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA). Ultimately, we discovered that children with ASD had the ability to synchronize their gaze shifts with the female model in the video during RJA tasks. Compared to the TD children, they displayed lower levels of synchronization and longer latency in this synchronized behavior. These findings provide a new avenue to deepen our understanding of the impairments of social interaction in children with ASD. Notably, the analytic method can be further applied to explore the social synchronization of numerous other social interactive behaviors in ASD. LAY SUMMARY: This study explored how autistic children synchronized their gazed shifts with others' gaze cues during joint attention. We found that compared to typical children, autistic children synchronized their gazed shifts less and needed more time to follow others' gaze. These findings provide a new avenue to deepen our understanding of the impairments of social interaction in children with ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2021 · doi:10.1002/aur.2553