Sensitivity and Specificity of Developmental Surveillance and Autism Screening in an Australian Multicultural Cohort: The Watch Me Grow Study.
Remove nearby toys and both autistic and typical toddlers will look at you more.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bernie et al. (2025) watched toddlers with and without autism during two quick eye-tracking clips. In one clip toys sat next to the actor; in the other clip toys were gone.
The team asked: do toys pull autistic toddlers' eyes away from faces more than they pull typical toddlers' eyes?
What they found
When toys disappeared, both groups looked more at faces and bodies. The gap between groups stayed the same, just both sides moved up.
Objects did not widen the autism–typical split; they simply lowered everyone's social looking a notch.
How this fits with other research
Mammarella et al. (2022) ran almost the same toy-in/toy-out set-up and saw a large drop in social orienting for autistic toddlers only. The new study finds a mild, equal drop in both groups. The clash is likely about how strict the coding was: C et al. used a sharper SADOE measure that may catch smaller ASD-only dips.
Anthony et al. (2020) also saw autistic kids split their gaze evenly between people and objects, while typical kids favored people. Charmaine's data now say that bias can be shrunk just by lifting the objects, giving hope for quick environmental tweaks.
Lemons et al. (2015) add a twist: preschoolers with autism did not show pupil stress when looking at eyes. So lower face looking is probably not because eyes feel scary; toys may simply out-compete faces for attention.
Why it matters
You can raise social attention in almost any toddler by clearing the table. Before starting PRT or ESDM, stash the spinners and tablets. A bare workspace gives faces a fair shot, buying you more teaching moments without extra effort.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Put toys on a shelf out of sight before you sit face-to-face with the child.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
A growing body of research shows that children with autism exhibit selective limitations in their ability to direct their visual attention to social stimuli. The cause of this selective limitation, however, remains unknown. The main purpose of this study is to determine whether the limitations in social attention are influenced by the objects in the environment. Specifically, the study examines the differences in visual attention between children with autism and typically developing (TD) children as they view videos of social interactions under two conditions, with and without objects. The sample consisted of 53 children with autism and 74 TD children, aged between 18 and 36 months. The findings indicated that young children with autism exhibited differences in their social attention compared to their TD peers. The results revealed that the presence of objects did not affect the visual attention differences between the two groups. However, removing objects from the environment positively impacted the social attention of both groups. In the condition without objects, both groups directed more visual attention more toward the Face and Body Areas of Interests (AoIs), whereas in the condition with objects, both groups prioritized looking at the Toy AoI. These findings have important implications for evidence-based decision-making, especially in designing early intervention environments for children with autism.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1111/dmcn.13964