Eye Movements and Behavioural Responses to Gaze-Contingent Expressive Faces in Typically Developing Infants and Infant Siblings.
Baby siblings of children with ASD already show flat social reactions to live faces at 6–12 months even though their looking patterns seem normal.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers watched 6- to 12-month-old babies while they played with a live face on a screen. The face smiled or looked sad when the baby looked at it.
Some babies had a brother or sister with autism. The rest were low-risk. Cameras tracked where each baby looked and coders scored how often the baby smiled or copied the face.
What they found
High-risk babies looked at the eyes and mouth just as much as low-risk babies. But they smiled less and rarely copied the face.
Their eyes were typical; their social reactions were not.
How this fits with other research
Merin et al. (2007) saw the same age group but used the Still-Face task. They found less eye contact in high-risk babies. The new study shows eye contact can look fine yet social give-and-take is still weak.
Palomo et al. (2022) studied home movies of babies later diagnosed with ASD. At 9–12 months those babies looked at faces a typical amount but responded to their name less. The two papers agree: looking without reacting is an early red flag.
Goulardins et al. (2013) ran a similar gaze-contingent face task with teens. Teens with ASD also showed weak emotion recognition and poor gaze-brain linking. The infant data now show this gap starts before the first birthday.
Why it matters
You can’t rely on eye gaze alone to spot risk. Add quick probes that need a baby to smile, imitate, or take a social turn. A short game with an animated face on an iPad could reveal these quiet gaps in real time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Studies with infant siblings of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder have attempted to identify early markers for the disorder and suggest that autistic symptoms emerge between 12 and 24 months of age. Yet, a reliable first-year marker remains elusive. We propose that in order to establish first-year manifestations of this inherently social disorder, we need to develop research methods that are sufficiently socially demanding and realistically interactive. Building on Keemink et al. [2019, Developmental Psychology, 55, 1362-1371], we employed a gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigm in which infants could interact with face stimuli. Infants could elicit emotional expressions (happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger) from on-screen faces by engaging in eye contact. We collected eye-tracking data and video-recorded behavioural response data from 122 (64 male, 58 female) typically developing infants and 31 infant siblings (17 male, 14 female) aged 6-, 9- and 12-months old. All infants demonstrated a significant Expression by AOI interaction (F(10, 1470) = 10.003, P < 0.001, ŋp2 = 0.064). Infants' eye movements were "expression-specific" with infants distributing their fixations to AOIs differently per expression. Whereas eye movements provide no evidence of deviancies, behavioural response data show significant aberrancies in reciprocity for infant siblings. Infant siblings show reduced social responsiveness at the group level (F(1, 147) = 4.10, P = 0.042, ŋp2 = 0.028) and individual level (Fischer's Exact, P = 0.032). We conclude that the gaze-contingency paradigm provides a realistically interactive experience capable of detecting deviancies in social responsiveness early, and we discuss our results in relation to subsequent infant sibling development. LAY SUMMARY: We investigated how infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder respond to interactive faces presented on a computer screen. Our study demonstrates that infant siblings are less responsive when interacting with faces on a computer screen (e.g., they smile and imitate less) in comparison to infants without an older sibling with autism. Reduced responsiveness within social interaction could potentially have implications for how parents and carers interact with these infants. Autism Res 2021, 14: 973-983. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2021 · doi:10.1002/aur.2432