This study tracked eye movement in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) watching emotional biological and non-biological motion point-light-displays (PLDs). Older children with ASD focused on extremities while older typically developing (TD) children looked at figure’s heads, whereas not evident in the younger groups. These results suggest developmental advances in social-information biases in TD children not evident in children with ASD, together with atypical and potentially adaptive increases in attentional biases towards local motion cues with age in ASD. Potential avenues for future computational and methodological analyses are discussed.

Time of Day (ToD) of eye-tracking data acquisition may be a confounding variable that disproportionately impacts certain groups. This research examines attentional differences between infants with Lower-Likelihood (LL) and Higher-Likelihood (HL) for atypical developmental outcomes. We find that LL infants tend to pay more overall attention to eye-tracking probes during midday than their HL counterparts. Future research should examine and address factors underlying ToD-associated group differences and explore frameworks for systematically addressing additional eye-tracking confounding variables.

Data loss in eye-tracking studies is often considered a nuisance variable or noise. This study examined the value of data loss in eye tracking and proposed a new method to utilize lost data in predicting the clinical characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We used eye tracking to confirm previous findings on atypical attention patterns and further utilized behavior coding to examine the three types of causes of data loss including blinks, non-compliant behaviors, and technical errors. We discovered that data loss due to blinking was associated with a lack of interest in social cues, and data loss due to non-compliance predicted a greater severity of ASD symptoms. These results suggest that the loss of data in eye tracking is meaningful as a measure of diminished social attention and a reflection of clinical characteristics in ASD.