Basic oculomotor function is similar in young children with ASD and typically developing controls.
Young kids with autism move their eyes just like peers; social attention, not eye hardware, drives gaze differences.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched the eyes of preschoolers with autism and same-age peers.
Kids sat in front of a screen. A cartoon or a dot popped up.
Cameras tracked how fast and how far their eyes jumped.
What they found
Both groups moved their eyes the same way.
Speed, accuracy, and pause time were nearly identical.
Basic eye motors are not broken in young autism.
How this fits with other research
Byiers et al. (2025) looked at older kids and added an ADHD group. They did find tiny eye-jump errors. The difference is age and extra ADHD.
Congiu et al. (2016) saw kids with autism miss the meaning of a gaze, even though the eyes moved fine. That study shows the trouble is social understanding, not muscle control.
Kleberg et al. (2017) got preschoolers with autism to look at eyes faster by adding a beep. Again, the eyes can move; they just need the right prompt.
Why it matters
When a child with autism does not follow your gaze, do not assume poor vision or eye control. The eyes work. The child may need social cues or rewards to care about where you look. Save time by skipping eye-movement drills. Teach the value of faces instead.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A variety of eye tracking studies have demonstrated that young children with ASD gaze at images and movies of social interactions differently than typically developing children. These findings have supported the hypothesis that gaze behavior differences are generated by a weaker preference for social stimuli in ASD children. The hypothesis assumes that gaze differences are not caused by abnormalities in oculomotor function including saccade frequency and kinematics. Previous studies of oculomotor function have mostly been performed with school-age children, adolescents, and adults using visual search, anti-saccade, and gap saccade tasks that are less suitable for young pre-school children. Here, we examined oculomotor function in 144 children (90 with ASD and 54 controls), 1-10-years-old, as they watched two animated movies interleaved with the presentation of multiple salient stimuli that elicited saccades-to-targets. The results revealed that the number of fixations, fixation duration, number of saccades, saccade duration, saccade accuracy, and saccade latency did not differ significantly across groups. Minor initial differences in saccade peak velocity were not supported by analysis with a linear mixed model. These findings suggest that most children with ASD exhibit similar oculomotor function to that of controls, when performing saccades-to-targets or freely viewing child-friendly movies. This suggests that previously reported gaze abnormalities in children with ASD are not due to underlying oculomotor deficiencies. LAY SUMMARY: This study demonstrates that children with ASD perform similar eye movements to those of controls when freely observing movies or making eye movements to targets. Similar results were apparent across groups in the number of eye movements, their accuracy, duration, and other measures that assess eye movement control. These findings are important for interpreting previously reported differences in gaze behavior of children with ASD, which are likely due to atypical social preferences rather than impaired control of eye movements.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2021 · doi:10.1002/aur.2592