Social Synchronization During Joint Attention in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract Background: This study examined the social synchronization in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when responding to others’ joint attention. Social synchronization refers to an individuals’ temporal coordination during social interactions, which has been found to play a crucial role in social development. Deficient joint attention has been repeatedly found in individuals with autism spectrum disorder, and previous studies have demonstrated various explanations about it. In a more recent perspective, joint attention could be associated with spontaneous social motor synchronization, and it is possible to explore social synchronization as a pathway to understanding the impairments of joint attention in children with ASD.Methods: Forty-one children aged 5 to 8 with ASD and 43 age-matched typically developing (TD) children watched a video to completed the response to joint attention (RJA) tasks, during which their gaze data were collected. The synchronization of gaze-shift behaviors between children and the female model in the video was measured with the cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA). Results: We found that children with ASD had the ability, to some extent, to synchronize their gaze shifts with the female model in the video during RJA tasks. However, compared to the TD children, children with ASD displayed lower levels of synchronization and longer latency in this synchronized behavior. Limitations: The RJA task in our study was not a real social interaction task but rather a one-way interaction. Social interaction between two persons through live video or a natural scenario should be further explored. Besides, additional work is necessary to determine whether our findings generalize to individuals across the full autism spectrum. Conclusion: These findings provide a new avenue to deepen our understanding of the impairments of joint attention in children with ASD. Notably, the analytic method can be further applied to explore the social synchronization of numerous other social interactive behaviors in ASD. Additionally, the impairment of social synchronization may be a new implicit indicator for the evaluation of autism and can be utilized to screen children with ASD along with other indicators.