Validation of eye-tracking measures of social attention as a potential biomarker for autism clinical trials.
A quick eye-tracking clip of social bids strongly mirrors parent social-communication ratings, giving trials an objective yardstick.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Davidovitch et al. (2018) asked if eye-tracking can stand in for parent reports in autism drug trials. They showed the kids with ASD a two-minute cartoon where a woman makes social bids. A remote camera logged how long each child looked at her eyes, mouth, or body.
Parents filled out two standard checklists about the child’s everyday social communication. The team ran simple correlations between gaze time and checklist scores.
What they found
Kids who looked longer at the woman’s face scored higher on parent-rated social communication. The link was strong (r ≈ .70) and held for both checklists.
Because the eye measure took two minutes and the checklists took 30, the authors argue gaze time is a cheap, objective trial endpoint.
How this fits with other research
The finding builds on Ahlborn et al. (2008) who first used eye-tracking in autism. J used still picture arrays and linked gaze to repetitive behavior; Michael swapped in a social video and linked gaze to social skill, updating the same idea for a new domain.
Kong et al. (2025) extends the work by showing uncorrected astigmatism blunts face looking. If you plan to use Michael’s biomarker, screen vision first or you may misread a blurry-eyed kid as socially disengaged.
Begeer et al. (2006) seems to contradict Michael: they found autistic kids looked at faces normally when told why faces matter. The gap is methodological—Sander gave explicit instructions while Michael used passive viewing. Both can be true; instructions normalize gaze, but passive gaze still predicts real-world social scores.
Why it matters
You can now add a two-minute eye-tracking clip to baseline and post-tests instead of relying only on long parent forms. The score gives an immediate, unbiased read of social attention, handy for measuring drug or behavioral gains. Just remember to check the child’s glasses prescription first so vision issues don’t muddy your data.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
UNLABELLED: Social communication impairments are a core feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and this class of symptoms is a target for treatments for the disorder. Measures of social attention, assessed via eye-gaze tracking (EGT), have been proposed as an early efficacy biomarker for clinical trials targeting social communication skills. EGT measures have been shown to differentiate children with ASD from typical children; however, there is less known about their relationships with social communication outcome measures that are typically used in ASD clinical trials. In the present study, an EGT task involving viewing a videotape of an actor making bids for a child's attention was evaluated in 25 children with ASD aged 24-72 months. Children's attention to the actor during the dyadic bid condition measured via EGT was found to be strongly associated with five well-validated caregiver-reported outcome measures that are commonly used to assess social communication in clinical trials. These results highlight the convergent validity of EGT measures of social attention in relation to caregiver-reported clinical measures. EGT holds promise as a non-invasive, quantitative, and objective biomarker that is associated with social communication abilities in children with ASD. Autism Res 2018, 11: 166-174. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Eye-gaze tracking (EGT), an automated tool that tracks eye-gaze patterns, might help measure outcomes in clinical trials investigating interventions to treat autism spectrum disorders. In this study, an EGT task was evaluated in children with ASD, who watched a video with an actor talking directly to them. Patterns of eye-gaze were associated with caregiver-reported measures of social communication that are used in clinical trials. We show EGT may be a promising objective tool measuring outcomes.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2018 · doi:10.1002/aur.1894