A longitudinal study of social orienting in preschool children with ASD

Children with ASD would show less social oriented behaviors, as demonstrated in ecological and also experimental situations. The main goal of this study is to understand the connection between the development of social orienting skills in these two situations. Once a month within a year, 13 preschool children with ASD were filmed during daily classroom interactions in order to study visual attention behaviors directed to adults (The Observer XT10 Noldus). In addition, these children have seen faces and objects in a preference task using eye tracking. On the longitudinal plane, a reduction of fixation count to face in eye-tracking task is related to an improvement of social orienting total duration in class. Children's progression can be related to their baseline score on the task and to their scores of ECSC scales at the beginning of the study.