individuals autism

td children

individuals asd

autistic traits

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties in emotional processing. Children with ASD seem to have different cognitive patterns during multimodal emotion recognition compared with typically developing (TD) children. In order to explore the differences, in the current study, perceptual judgment data and eye gaze data while watching the ecological valid facial stimuli were analyzed. The perceptual judgment could intuitively reflect the perception deficits in ASD, and the eye tracker could accurately track their fixation and scan paths during emotion perception. Perceptual results indicated that children with ASD had more difficulties in emotion recognition in comparison with TD children, especially for negative emotions. Eye gaze analysis also showed that children with ASD had decreased fixation duration on the areas of interests (AOIs) compared to TD children, yet they seemed to pay more attention to negative facial expressions than to positive ones. Furthermore, the trajectory of eye gaze movement showed difference patterns between children with ASD and TD children. The TD children have dynamically changed their gaze directions from one region to the other, while most of the children with ASD only tended to focus on one particular region. These results may deepen our understanding of the multimodal emotion recognition pattern in the ASD cohort with a more natural communication environment.

Multimodal Emotion Perception in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder by Eye Tracking Study