Paternal autistic traits are predictive of infants visual attention.

Ronconi et al. (2014) watched 8-month-old babies look at pictures while an eye tracker recorded every glance.

The team also asked each baby’s father to fill out the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, a short self-report of autistic traits.

By pairing the fathers’ trait scores with the infants’ looking patterns, they could see if dads’ traits predicted how babies moved their eyes.

Infants whose dads scored higher on autistic traits were slower to look away from a picture once they fixated on it.

These same babies also shifted their gaze to new spots faster and showed weaker alerting responses to sudden cues.

In plain words, the higher the father’s trait level, the “stickier” and yet “springier” the baby’s early attention system became.

Laycock et al. (2014) saw the same trait-attention link in adults: people with high traits had trouble when pictures flashed on briefly, a conceptual replication that shows the pattern spans ages.

van Timmeren et al. (2016) used brain waves and found weaker distractor suppression in high-trait adults, giving neural evidence for the “sticky” attention Luca noticed in babies.

Zhou et al. (2018) extended the story by showing that infants who already show social-impairment signs, not just those with high-trait dads, also attend less to others’ distress—suggesting multiple early pathways to atypical attention.

You now have a quick, non-invasive risk marker: ask dads a 10-minute questionnaire and watch how their babies look at toys or faces.

If you see slow disengagement plus rapid shifting, build extra practice with joint-attention games and social gaze turns into your sessions.

Starting these habits before the first birthday may soften later social-communication hurdles, even when a full diagnosis is still years away.