Object To explore the eye movements track of the emotional faces in children with autism spectrum disorder(ASD) by the movement technique. Methods Totally 14 children with ASD and 14 typical developed(TD) children participated our study.5 areas of interest (AOIs:upper screen,low screen,mouth,eyes and non-core areas of the face) were defined.60 pictures contained 5 types of emotional face(angry,fear,sad,surprise and neural,12 pictures for each type) and picture of soft candy were the probe stimulus.The ability of children with ASD were assessed by Gilliam Autism Rating Scale-2 (GARS-2) and Autism Quotient (AQ).Eye movements were measured by ASL eyetrack6000.Participants were informed to response (press "1") to the soft candy immediately and watch the faces with no response. Results Compared with TD children,children with ASD showed significantly less numbers and durations of fixation on the face.However,both groups tended to spend significantly more time looking at the non-core area,and spent the less time looking at the upper area of the screen.Correlation analysis showed that fixation to eye presented positive correlation with behavior scores of GARS,and the fixation to mouth presented negative correlation with social scores of GARS. Conclusion In the present study,children with ASD showed significantly less fixations on the emotional face with TD,but we cannot find any different of the fixation between eye and mouth.This finding supports that ASD and TD have the similar eye movement patterns but less fixation numbers and fixation time.Also if ASD spends more time looking at mouth,they show greater social ability,and if more time at eye,greater behavior problems.
Key words
autism spectrum disorder /
emotional face /
eye movement /
social ability
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