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Updated: May 11, 2026
Eye Tracking Young Children with Autism
Published on: March 27, 2012
Two-year-olds with autism orient to non-social contingencies rather than biological motion
Ami Klin1, David J Lin, Phillip Gorrindo
1Yale Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut 06519-1124, USA. ami.klin@yale.edu
Insights
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may not focus on biological motion like typically developing infants. Instead, they may respond to non-social physical cues, impacting social development.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Autism Research
Background:
- Infants typically attend to biological motion, crucial for social development and predator detection.
- Biological motion perception shares neural pathways with social signal processing, like facial recognition.
- Early attention to biological motion may precede the ability to infer others' intentions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit altered perception of biological motion.
- To determine if children with ASD respond to non-social physical contingencies within visual stimuli instead of biological motion.
- To explore the implications of these findings for the neurodevelopmental trajectory in ASD.
Main Methods:
- Observational study comparing two-year-olds with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
- Utilized point-light displays (PLDs) to present biological motion stimuli.
- Analyzed viewing behavior to differentiate responses to biological motion versus non-social physical contingencies.
Main Results:
- Two-year-olds with ASD failed to orient towards point-light displays of biological motion.
- Viewing patterns in children with ASD were explained by responses to non-social physical contingencies.
- Control children disregarded these physical contingencies, focusing on biological motion.
Conclusions:
- Altered perception of biological motion may be present in very young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
- This early difference could lead to a focus on non-social physical cues over social information.
- Findings suggest significant implications for understanding the neurodevelopmental basis of social interaction impairments in ASD.
Abstract:
Typically developing human infants preferentially attend to biological motion within the first days of life. This ability is highly conserved across species and is believed to be critical for filial attachment and for detection of predators. The neural underpinnings of biological motion perception are overlapping with brain regions involved in perception of basic social signals such as facial expression and gaze direction, and preferential attention to biological motion is seen as a precursor to the capacity for attributing intentions to others. However, in a serendipitous observation, we recently found that an infant with autism failed to recognize point-light displays of biological motion, but was instead highly sensitive to the presence of a non-social, physical contingency that occurred within the stimuli by chance. This observation raised the possibility that perception of biological motion may be altered in children with autism from a very early age, with cascading consequences for both social development and the lifelong impairments in social interaction that are a hallmark of autism spectrum disorders. Here we show that two-year-olds with autism fail to orient towards point-light displays of biological motion, and their viewing behaviour when watching these point-light displays can be explained instead as a response to non-social, physical contingencies--physical contingencies that are disregarded by control children. This observation has far-reaching implications for understanding the altered neurodevelopmental trajectory of brain specialization in autism.
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