Brief Report: Infants Developing with ASD Show a Unique Developmental Pattern of Facial Feature Scanning.
Babies later diagnosed with ASD lose interest in eyes at 9 months and never regain it, unlike typical peers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Spriggs et al. (2015) watched where 6- to 24-month-old babies looked while they saw faces on a screen.
Some babies were later diagnosed with ASD; matched peers were not.
Eye-tracking cameras recorded every glance for split-second timing.
What they found
Typical babies looked less at eyes at 9 months, then bounced back.
ASD babies also dropped eye gaze at 9 months—but they never returned.
The eye-interest gap stayed wide through the second birthday.
How this fits with other research
Geurts et al. (2008) first saw gaze problems at 6 months; this study shows the loss keeps going.
Wan et al. (2019) turned the same eye-difference into a 10-second screener for preschoolers, proving the marker lasts.
Harrop et al. (2018) adds a twist: girls with ASD keep more face-looking than boys, so the drop may hit boys harder.
Spanoudis et al. (2011) found adults with ASD still avoid eyes, showing the pattern never rights itself without help.
Why it matters
If a baby you see stops meeting your eyes over the study period, flag it.
Track eye gaze over months, not just one visit.
Early action can start before the full diagnostic picture is clear.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Infants are interested in eyes, but look preferentially at mouths toward the end of the first year, when word learning begins. Language delays are characteristic of children developing with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We measured how infants at risk for ASD, control infants, and infants who later reached ASD criterion scanned facial features. Development differed across groups. The preference for the eyes region decreased with age in infants who were at risk of ASD. For the control group the change in feature preference was marginally significant for a quadratic model, reflecting a decrease in the preference for eyes at 9 months followed by a recovery. The infants who later reached ASD criterion did not show a significant change across time.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2015 · doi:10.1007/s10803-015-2396-7