Eye-tracking study reveals visual preferences in toddlers with autism

Young children with autism tend to look less at faces and more at background details than their peers do, but taking objects out of their environment changes how they observe others. Removing toys from a social scene increases the amount of time all children spend looking at people, which could inform better designs for clinical and educational spaces. The findings were published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition that influences communication, behavior, and social skills. One common feature of the condition in early childhood is a reduced tendency to look at the faces and eyes of other people. Psychologists use the term visual attention to describe how a person unconsciously decides where to direct their gaze in any given environment. When a child routinely focuses their eyes on toys or background details instead of human faces, they miss out on subtle social gestures and facial expressions.

Over time, a pattern of looking away from people can limit a child’s access to social learning experiences. Most young children naturally look toward faces because the human brain perceives social interactions as highly rewarding. When this natural drive to watch faces is altered, it can change the trajectory of how the brain develops its social and cognitive networks. Researchers want to know exactly what captures the attention of children with autism and whether changing the surrounding environment can alter their visual habits.

Psychologists use the concept of object value to explain why eyes naturally dart toward certain items in a busy room. The human brain continuously scans its surroundings and calculates how useful or relevant a piece of information might be for survival or social success. Typically, the brain assigns an exceptionally high value to human faces because expressions provide necessary behavioral clues. This internal valuation system dictates whether a person will prioritize looking at a social stimulus or a non-social object.

Isik Akin-Bulbul and Selda Ozdemir, a pair of researchers in the special education department at Hacettepe University in Turkey, noticed a gap in the existing research. Many studies test whether autistic children prefer looking at objects over people, but those studies often place a face on one side of a screen and an object on the other side. Real social interactions happen in chaotic rooms filled with mixed stimuli. The researchers wanted to see if the presence of toys inside a single dynamic scene would change how children allocate their visual attention.

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To test this idea, the researchers enlisted 127 children between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six months. Fifty-three of the participants had a confirmed autism diagnosis, while the other seventy-four children were developing along expected timelines. The research team made sure the two groups were matched in age to provide a fair comparison. None of the children in the typically developing group had a family history of autism or siblings with developmental issues.

The team sat each child in front of a computer monitor equipped with an eye-tracking device. An eye tracker is a specialized camera that follows the exact movements of a person’s pupils in real time, calculating exactly where their gaze lands on a screen and how long it stays there. The technology allows researchers to record invisible, split-second changes in attention without asking the child to perform any specific tasks. The children simply had to watch a series of short videos on the monitor while sitting on a chair or in a parent’s lap.

The short video clips featured an adult and a child having a fun conversation. Three of the videos included objects, and three of the videos showed social interactions without any toys present. In the clips with objects, the actors played with a stuffed pelican, put toy people on a school bus, and tried to put a toy dog on the bus. In the clips without objects, the child ate a biscuit while the adult asked for a bite, the child offered the biscuit to the adult, and the two conversed about sharing a piece of chocolate.

Using analytical software, the research team mapped invisible boundaries over specific regions of the video screen. They designated these regions as the face area, the body area, the toy area, and the external background area. The software then calculated the total amount of time each child’s right eye lingered inside these marked boundaries. By comparing the viewing patterns, the researchers could uncover exactly how toys altered the children’s focus.

The results matched previous observations indicating that autistic children view environments differently than their naturally developing peers. Across all the videos, the children with autism spent much less time looking at faces than the typically developing children did. The children with autism also spent exceptionally high amounts of time looking at external background details. These differences existed no matter what was happening in the video clip.

When toys were visible in the scene, both groups of children found the objects highly distracting. Both the autistic children and the typically developing children spent the largest chunk of their time staring directly at the toys, prioritizing the objects over the people. Beyond the toys, the priority of gaze shifted depending on the group. The typically developing children looked at faces second, followed by bodies, and finally the background.

The children with autism showed a contrasting pattern when toys were present. After looking at the toys, the autistic children focused their eyes on the human bodies and the background scenery next. Faces were the last place they directed their visual attention in the scenes containing objects. This pattern reveals a pronounced tendency for autistic children to prefer non-social information in visually busy environments.

Taking the toys out of the video clips produced an immediate shift in visual behavior for all the participants. Without toys to distract them, both groups spent far more time staring at the faces and bodies of the actors on the screen. The gap in visual attention between the two groups remained similar, but removing objects universally elevated the amount of time everyone spent watching the social interaction.

Taking the toys out of the picture prompted the children with autism to look at bodies prior to looking at faces. The researchers suspect this might be due to the hand gestures and body movements the actors used while discussing the snacks. The findings suggest that autistic children might rely heavily on broader body language during social interactions, picking up cues from overall movements before observing specific facial features.

Parents and clinical professionals invest massive amounts of time into helping autistic toddlers build communication skills. Any imbalance in how a child allocates their visual focus can disrupt the success of these early interventions. Discovering exactly what redirects a child’s eyes during a play session can help adults create environments that naturally encourage social engagement. This research provides a direct window into how environmental complexity directly alters the ways neurodiverse children experience the world.

While the study provides a detailed look at how environments shape visual attention, the researchers noted a few limitations to their approach. To avoid reporting false findings, the team used rigorous mathematical corrections to analyze their data. They noted that this strict analytical strategy might have masked some subtle variations in how the children looked at the screens, meaning certain minor numerical differences were not statistically significant in the final calculations. Future studies might use a different balance of error control to capture more delicate changes in visual behavior.

Additionally, all the children involved in the experiment were already diagnosed with autism. Because they were assessed as older toddlers, the researchers could not track how these visual patterns originated. Understanding the developmental roots of autism will require testing infants from birth to see if and when they stop prioritizing faces over objects.

Despite the limitations, the findings carry practical weight for parents and educators working with neurodivergent toddlers. Because objects inevitably draw attention away from faces, clinical professionals might want to design early intervention spaces with fewer visual distractions. Managing the visual clutter in a room could gently encourage children with autism to spend more time observing the people around them.

The study, “Evaluation of the Social Attention Hypothesis: Do Children with Autism Prefer to See Objects Rather than People?,” was authored by Isik Akin-Bulbul and Selda Ozdemir.