Eye movement patterns in adult autism spectrum disorder.

There is a growing interest towards the nature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in adults in the social cognition literature to gain further insights about the nature of language and cognition. Joint attention, which constitutes the basis of any social encounter, is one of the important predictors of language development and social learning. Referring expressions are linguistic resources that speakers use to achieve joint attention by identifying and referring to the objects relevant to the ongoing interaction. Reference production and understanding involve the ability to think of and represent objects, to direct others' attention to relevant objects, and to identify what other speakers are talking about when they use such expressions. People with ASD exhibit difficulties for using such references since their competent use requires an understanding of the partner's cognitive status and what information might be available/accessible from the partner's perspective. Existing studies have produced conflicting characterizations since they tend to use simulated scenarios at the individual level of analysis. New experimental paradigms are needed that include both sides of naturalistic social interaction where eye movements and linguistic structures can be analyzed together. This study aims to address this need by employing a dual eye-tracking paradigm where linguistic structures are analyzed in relation to gaze correlates of joint attention. 21 ASD adults and 21 age/education-matched controls participated in the study. During the experiment, participants interacted through a computerized tangram puzzle. Participants assumed two interchanging roles; the presenter had access to the target shape and the workspace but could not move the tangram pieces, whereas the operator could only see the workspace and had control of the mouse. Our initial findings suggest that controls exhibited significantly higher level of gaze coordination than the ASD group, and there is a significant difference between gaze coordination levels observed for presenters and operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]