Utility of Social Attention Eye-Tracking Measures as Predictors of Response to Intervention

Abstract

Early interventions for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are variability effective, and examination of child characteristics of as predictors of response to intervention have been limited. Based on the social motivation theory, reduced basic visual social attention and joint attention behavior are downstream indicators of reward processing deficits. As such, these measures of social attention may predict child responsiveness to interventions relying heavily on reward learning strategies. Eye-tracking measures of social attention may be particularly useful predictors given their efficiency, high resolution, and ease of administration. However, their properties and construct validity have not been sufficiently investigated. In this study, I examined the properties and construct validity of social attention eye-tracking measures to determine their potential utility as predictors of response to intervention. Differences were not found between ASD and typically developing control groups on percentage of time spent looking at social scenes on a preferential looking eye-tracking task, or on accurate gaze shifts in a response to joint attention eye-tracking task. Age effects may have mitigated group differences. However, participants with ASD had more gaze transitions between face and target object in an initiation of joint attention eye-tracking task. Examination of the eye-tracking measures with more ecological behavioral measures revealed preliminary construct validity for the basic visual social attention eye-tracking task but not for the joint attention eye-tracking tasks. These findings indicate that the eye-tracking measure of basic visual social attention holds promise as a predictor of response to intervention and suggest a need to examine this measure as a pre-test variable in future studies of intervention effectiveness.