These difficulties are largely related to understanding the referential nature of gaze and/or assigning social relevance to gazed-at objects 9, 10, 11. Difficulties processing shifts in eye gaze are present in infants later diagnosed with ASD 5 and persist for autistic individuals through childhood 6, adolescence 7 and adulthood 8. Developing sensitivity to eye gaze shifts is foundational to multiple social communicative sills, including joint attention 2, language 3, and theory of mind 4. These shifts in gaze are used to communicate the relative importance of objects and people in the world. A core feature of autism is difficulty perceiving and interpreting shifts in eye gaze as nonverbal communicative signals. NCT02968225 Similar content being viewed by othersĪutism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifetime condition that impacts social communicative behavior 1. Importantly, this is the first study to measure social visual attention via eye tracking as a treatment response in an RCT for autism. However, at post-test, autistic adolescents in the treatment group were more likely to identify the object of directed gaze when they attended longer to faces and longer to target objects. Second, Prior to the SAGA intervention, attention to faces failed to predict performance in the Gaze Perception task for both the treatment and standard care control groups. Instead, both groups evinced a small increase in SVA to faces over time. In contrast to predictions, SVA to faces did not differentially increase for the treatment group. Here, we determine whether increases in social visual attention to faces and/or target gazed-at objects, as measured via eye tracking during the same Gaze Perception task in the same study sample, moderated this improvement. Previously, we demonstrated the effectiveness of SAGA to improve the perception and understanding of eye gaze cues and social skills for autistic adolescents (Griffin et al.

BMJ Open 8(9):e023682, 2018) as a serious game intervention for autistic individuals to discover the significance of eye gaze cues. We developed Social Games for Autistic Adolescents (SAGA Scherf et al. A hypothesis about the origins of this phenotype is that it emerges from developmentally different social visual attention (SVA). A core feature of autism involves difficulty perceiving and interpreting eye gaze shifts as nonverbal communicative signals.

Social questions for autism