Autism research:In an approach where the eyes can do the talking, scientists are tracking eye movements in young people as a way to help understand autism.
Eye-tracking techniques can be used to record eye movements of young volunteers while they watch video clips. This technique is being used to investigate how individuals with autism take note of social cues such as eye contact, said Dr Courtenay Norbury at the press launch of the festival of science.
"Our new research suggests that the individuals with autism took more note of social cues such as eye contact than previously thought, regardless of whether or not they have an additional language impairment," said Dr Norbury from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Autism is a developmental disorder where individuals experience behavioural, social and communication difficulties. "Many researchers believe that poor social understanding lies at the heart of autism," said Dr Norbury. "Eye-tracking technology is enabling researchers to investigate social processing in situations that are much closer to those experienced in real life. We created regions of interest on each frame of the video and calculated when and for how long the participant fixated on the regions."
The work shows what people with autism can do given the right circumstances.
"We found no significant increase in the time autistic individuals with language difficulties spent looking at the mouth region compared to those without this additional language problem. In addition, the amount of time both groups with autism spent looking at eyes did not differ from their non-autistic peers," said Dr Norbury.
"The individuals with autism who had additional language impairments tended to spend less time looking at faces generally, but when they did look at the face spent significantly more time looking at eyes than mouths."
Dr Norbury hopes the research will be a first step in developing educational and therapeutic interventions.