Looking behavior is an effective conduit for social abilities, communication skills and reasoning. Observational testing has shown children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) display atypical looking behavior, such as attending to objects rather than faces, where they miss important social interactions that aid social adaptation, language development and learning. When these distributed characteristics are modeled and quantified overtime, they become a robust predictor of autism – a neurodevelopmental condition.
These and other studies3-7 defined atypical looking behavior as a neurodevelopmental endophenotype for autism and laid the foundation for understanding individual development when social visual engagement is impaired at an early age. Because social experience aids intellectual, behavioral, and communicative development, children whose attention drifts to less salient aspects of social stimuli miss opportunities for social learning and development, which accrue by the thousands over the first 2-3 years of life.
This understanding is the basis for our work and our mission to make earlier identification and treatment for ASD and related disabilities accessible to children everywhere.