Table 1.
Scores of the ASD and TD children on the ADI and Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales.
Figure 1.
Left: Schematic view of the images recorded by the WearCam, highlighted are the interaction zone (top), the eyes reflected by the eye-mirror (middle) and the manipulation zone (bottom). Software for automatic monitoring of the child's gaze and detection of human faces in the camera images is used to quantify, among other factors, the frequency and length of time during which the child looks at human faces. Right: The WearCam worn by a typically developing child.
Figure 2.
1st column: the location of the eyes in the image is extracted automatically during post-hoc calibration. 2nd column: the direction of gaze is computed automatically from the eyes image through support vector regression. 3rd column: to highlight the direction of central vision (indicated by a crosshair), the image is blurred except for an area of 10 degrees radius around the center of the gaze. 4th & 5th columns Gaze tracking example while looking downwards: the system uses the whole eye region (shading of the eyelids, shape of the eyelashes, etc) to compute the gaze direction.
Figure 3.
Protocol setup for the experiments.
Figure 4.
Schema of the events recorded.
Whenever a face appeared in a frame, one or more of these events occurred. in FoV: a face (rectangle) is present in the broad field of view; in CV: a face is inside a 10° radius of the Central Vision (crosshair).
Table 2.
Comparison of gaze factors for TD and ASD groups.
Table 3.
2-way ANCOVAs on the variables In CV and Episode Duration, controlling for Developmental Age.
Table 4.
2-way ANCOVAs on the variables Mean Elevation and Lateral Exploration.
Figure 5.
Analysis of gaze directed toward faces.
in FoV: Percentage of time a face was in the broad field of view. in CV: Percentage of time a face was in central vision.
Figure 6.
Duration and frequency of episodes of gaze directed toward a face.
Figure 7.
Analysis of gaze dispersion across the field of view.
Mean vertical and lateral angles of the gaze when children were looking at non-social stimuli (top) and exploration of the gaze in the vertical and lateral directions (bottom).
Figure 8.
Lateral exploration as a function of developmental age.
For each child, the results of the 4 protocol items are displayed separately.