The Selective Social Attention task in children with autism spectrum disorder: Results from the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT) feasibility study.
A five-minute eye-tracking story separates kids with autism from peers and tracks symptom load.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Shic et al. (2023) tested a five-minute eye-tracking video called the Selective Social Attention task. Kids watched an actress tell a story while a camera recorded where they looked.
The study compared children with autism to typically developing peers. Researchers wanted to know if less looking at faces linked to more autism mannerisms.
What they found
Children with autism looked less at the actress's face and at the whole scene. The less they looked at the face, the more autism mannerisms their parents reported.
The five-minute scan was enough to tell the two groups apart.
How this fits with other research
Wan et al. (2019) got a similar result with only a ten-second clip, showing brief eye-tracking can flag autism risk. Frederick's longer task adds a quick, story-like format you can repeat each visit.
Harrop et al. (2018) found an apparent contradiction: autistic girls kept typical face-looking while autistic boys did not. Frederick's group-level drop in face gaze likely reflects mostly boys, so always check sex when you interpret scores.
Hou et al. (2024) showed autistic kids' gaze jumps around more, linking unstable looking to weaker social predictions. The SSA task gives you one stable number—percent time on face—that captures both problems.
Why it matters
You now have a five-minute, office-friendly probe that separates autism from typical development and tracks symptom load. Use it during intake or re-eval to get an objective social attention score. If a girl shows typical face-looking yet still has social struggles, dig deeper instead of trusting the number alone.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Selective Social Attention (SSA) task is a brief eye-tracking task involving experimental conditions varying along socio-communicative axes. Traditionally the SSA has been used to probe socially-specific attentional patterns in infants and toddlers who develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This current work extends these findings to preschool and school-age children. Children 4- to 12-years-old with ASD (N = 23) and a typically-developing comparison group (TD; N = 25) completed the SSA task as well as standardized clinical assessments. Linear mixed models examined group and condition effects on two outcome variables: percent of time spent looking at the scene relative to scene presentation time (%Valid), and percent of time looking at the face relative to time spent looking at the scene (%Face). Age and IQ were included as covariates. Outcome variables' relationships to clinical data were assessed via correlation analysis. The ASD group, compared to the TD group, looked less at the scene and focused less on the actress' face during the most socially-engaging experimental conditions. Additionally, within the ASD group, %Face negatively correlated with SRS total T-scores with a particularly strong negative correlation with the Autistic Mannerism subscale T-score. These results highlight the extensibility of the SSA to older children with ASD, including replication of between-group differences previously seen in infants and toddlers, as well as its ability to capture meaningful clinical variation within the autism spectrum across a wide developmental span inclusive of preschool and school-aged children. The properties suggest that the SSA may have broad potential as a biomarker for ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1037/xge0000014