Image perception and reception in wordless picture books: Eye movements of children with intellectual disabilities

Wordless picture books enhance comprehension and vocabulary growth and motivate children with intellectual disabilities to participate in literary activities. However, the reception of picture books can be challenging because deliberate selective attention processes and recognition of the image's meaning are often delayed. Examining eye movements may help explore these cognitive processes. Therefore, we examined eye movements in 29 children with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities as they explored a wordless picture book, presented on a screen and compared them to 14 typically developing children using a Tobii Pro X3-120 eye tracker. The findings showed that children with moderate intellectual disabilities had shorter fixation duration, fixated less often, and revisited regions of interest less frequently. Our results suggest that children with moderate intellectual disabilities have greater difficulties in selectively directing their attention toward regions of visual input with a high level of informativeness and expend less cognitive effort to understand their meaning.