Measuring social orienting in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder using cartoons stimuli

Altered social orienting (SO) was proposed as the primary source of socio-communicative difficulties in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eye-tracking studies generally confirm a decreased SO in ASD population. However, SO has been scarcely investigated using minimally social stimuli such as cartoons. The extent to which SO might be decreased when watching cartoons is therefore unknown. Yet, it could allow for malleable and child-friendly paradigms that could be sensitive to early atypical visual preference. In this study, 90 preschoolers with ASD (age = 3.19 ± 0 .88) and 20 TD (age = 2.95 ± 1.26) watched two eye-tracking preference tasks. One Realistic task, displaying children dancing versus geometric shapes moving repetitively and a Cartoon task, displaying social and non-social cartoon stimuli with similar movements. We measured SO percentage along with refined visual exploration parameters and compared those of ASD children to TDs. In addition, we investigated their relations with behavioral measures such as symptom severity, developmental and adaptive levels. We evidenced a decreased SO percentage in ASD compared to TD children when watching the Realistic task but not the Cartoon task. We did not identify any other between groups differences. However, we identified several correlations between eye-tracking measures and developmental as well as adaptive measures within the Cartoon task. Together, our results support a preferential orientation of children with autism towards repetitively moving shapes but no decreased SO when measured with minimally social stimuli. Nonetheless, when investigating finer visual exploration parameters, even socially simple stimuli elicited atypical gaze patterns related to early developmental delay.