Eye Tracking Exploring the Gaze Attention of Autistic Children
Last week ABC News ran a short piece on the science of reading a face. The story focused on six-month-olds’ ability to read facial expressions, and how, by studying this, doctors are now able to diagnose autism earlier than ever before. New studies show that early diagnosis and intervention can help with the long-term effects of autism, and doctors are now using eye tracking technology in these early diagnoses.
The piece highlighted Dr. Charles Nelson’s lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and his use of eye tracking technology in addition to a cutting-edge brain monitor to study electrical currents in the brains of babies. It’s sort of a webbing of electrodes that fits over a baby’s head, slipping easily on and off. As Nelson points out, before language begins, most communication is non-verbal, so babies rely heavily on their ability to read faces.
Nelson’s team uses eye tracking to follow a baby’s gaze on a screen, tracking every movement made. The baby is presented a series of three different faces interspersed with various other images, shapes, and distracting colors. The different faces are of a woman, expressing a happy look, a neutral look, and a one of fear. The studies show something that, perhaps, you wouldn’t expect – that babies focus attention and show more brain activity when observing the fearful expression. The researchers, however, were puzzled by this, as the babies showed no sign of discomfort or alarm when seeing it. They just look at it longer – 25% longer.
The theory is that babies may be more attracted to the fearful face because they’re teaching themselves to be concerned when they see it. Think about it. With parenting, educational, and behavioral trends using positive reinforcement, babies are more likely to see a happy face than one of alarm. Nelson says there may be a survival element to all of this too, as it’s critical, evolutionarily speaking, that long before you’re concerned with security and safety, you must be able to identify danger. These abilities are tracked to the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain. The amygdala provides humans the ability to recognize faces and read emotion, and its development depends on constant visual stimulation during infancy. Dr. Nelson says that if a baby wasn’t able to get that kind of stimulation when it’s most needed, it might have trouble later in life identifying emotion and interpreting facial expressions.
As mentioned in an earlier post, Autism is characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, including less frequent eye contact and an inability to differentiate between expressions and perceived emotion. With the aid of eye tracking supplementing the brain scanning performed by his team, Dr. Nelson hopes to identify signs of autism at just 3-6 months, long before the child may show any signs of the disorder. Says Dr. Nelson, “We hope to see a signature in their brain or in their eye movements that will say ‘this is the baby that we’re most concerned about and we then actually predict who will develop the disorder a year later.’”
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