Eye Tracking Analysis for Facial Expression and Gaze Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Eye tracking methods have been used to discover patterns underlying differences in eye contact and gaze in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Eye tracking measures may be used to measure ASD-related symptoms as possible behavioral biomarkers that characterize ASD. Such behavioral biomarkers may help clinicians monitor ASD-related symptoms over time or develop computer-based interventions to help individuals with ASD improve social, communication, and language skills. Recently, the Vision Lab completed a pilot feasibility study of a new experiment to measure facial expressions and gaze. This feasibility study recruited adult control subjects to study the validity of the experimental procedure and measures prior to recruiting the target population. This project develops a Python software suite of tools for data handling, preprocessing, computation of eye tracking measures from raw coordinate data, visualization, and metrics for assessing data acquisition and validity of experimental tasks. Using the software suite, we compute eye tracking metrics such as fixation duration in regions of interest of the experimental stimuli and validate these measures in the adult control group in the pilot feasibility study. We also visualize gaze patterns by plotting eye tracking coordinate data over the stimuli. In the future, we plan to use the software suite developed in this project to analyze data collected from children and young adults with ASD as a part of a larger ongoing study in the Vision Lab