Gaze Patterns of Children with Communication Difficulties Associated with Core Symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interactions.There is an urgent need to establish objective, simple, and accurate screening and diagnostic methods for ASD in childhood.Recently, the ability to visualize and quantify eye movements has emerged, suggesting that ASD may exhibit characteristic gaze patterns.To examine the potential of gaze patterns as an early marker of ASD, we analyzed the relationship between gaze patterns at ages 4-6 and individual ASD characteristics, as determined by the Autism Spectrum Quotient Japanese version for children (AQ-J-child) at age 6, using data from 4-to 6-year-old children recruited into the BirThree Cohort Study of the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project.The median gaze rate, which represents the percentage of time the subjects spent looking at the screen during the test, was 92%, reflecting the highly versatile nature and proper execution of this test in our study.We found that children with social impairment tend to prefer looking at geometric patterns.In addition, children with communication difficulties tend to spend less time looking at the eyes in still images of human faces.Our analyses of the relationships between various gaze results and ASD characteristics defined by AQ-J-child revealed that specific gaze preferences are significantly associated with communication difficulties, social impairment, and impaired imagination.These findings indicate that the gaze measurement results show strong correlations with specific aspects of ASD.Therefore, gaze patterns demonstrate the potential to reflect one aspect of ASD.