SYNGAP1-ID is a neurodevelopmental disorder caused by a mutation of the SYNGAP1 gene. Characterized by moderate to severe developmental delay, it is associated with several physical and behavioral issues as well as additional diagnoses, including autism. However, it is not known whether social cognitive differences seen in SYNGAP1-ID are similar to those previously identified in idiopathic or other forms of autism. This study therefore investigated visual social attention in SYNGAP1-ID. Eye movements were recorded across three passive viewing tasks (face scanning, pop-out, and social preference) of differing social complexity in 24 individuals with SYNGAP1-ID and 12 typically developing controls. We found that SYNGAP1-ID participants looked at faces less than the controls, and when they did look at faces, they had less time looking at and fewer fixations to the eyes. For the pop-out task, where social and nonsocial objects (Phone, car, face, bird, and face-noise) were presented in an array, those with SYNGAP1-ID spent significantly less time looking at the phone stimulus as well as fewer fixations to the face compared with the typically developing controls. When looking at two naturalistic scenes side by side, one social in nature (e.g., with children present) and the other not, there were no differences between the SYNGAP1-ID group and typically developing controls on any of the examined eye tracking measures. This study provides novel findings on the social attention of those with SYNGAP1-ID and helps to provide further evidence for using eye tracking as an objective measure of the social phenotype in this population in future clinical trials.

This study examined social-pragmatic inferencing, visual social attention and physiological reactivity to complex social scenes. Participants were autistic young adults (n = 14) and a control group of young adults (n = 14) without intellectual disability. Results indicate between-group differences in social-pragmatic inferencing, moment-level social attention and heart rate variability (HRV) reactivity. A key finding suggests associations between increased moment-level social attention to facial emotion expressions, better social-pragmatic inferencing and greater HRV suppression in autistic young adults. Supporting previous research, better social-pragmatic inferencing was found associated with less autistic traits.

Early social-linguistic experience influences infants\' attention to faces but little is known about how infants attend to the faces of speakers engaging in conversation. Here, we examine how monolingual and bilingual infants attended to speakers during a conversation, and we tested for the possibility that infants\' visual attention may be modulated by familiarity with the language being spoken. We recorded eye movements in monolingual and bilingual 15-to-24-month-olds as they watched video clips of speakers using infant-directed speech while conversing in a familiar or unfamiliar language, with each other and to the infant. Overall, findings suggest that bilingual infants visually shift attention to a speaker prior to speech onset more when an unfamiliar, rather than a familiar, language is being spoken. However, this same effect was not found for monolingual infants. Thus, infants\' familiarity with the language being spoken, and perhaps their language experiences, may modulate infants\' visual attention to speakers.

Attending preferentially to social information in the environment is important in developing socio-communicative skills and language. Research using eye tracking to explore how individuals with autism spectrum disorder deploy visual attention has increased exponentially in the past decade; however, studies have typically not included minimally verbal participants. In this study, we compared 37 minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder with 34 age-matched verbally fluent individuals with autism spectrum disorder in how they viewed a brief video in which a young woman, surrounded by interesting objects, engages the viewer, and later reacts with expected or unexpected gaze-shifts toward the objects. While both groups spent comparable amounts of time looking at different parts of the scene and looked longer at the person than at the objects, the minimally verbal autism spectrum disorder group spent significantly less time looking at the person\'s face during the episodes where gaze following-a precursor of joint attention-was critical for interpreting her behavior. Proportional looking-time toward key areas of interest in some episodes correlated with receptive language measures. These findings underscore the connections between social attention and the development of communicative abilities in autism spectrum disorder.

Diminished attention to socially relevant information appears to be an early emerging risk factor associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, inconsistencies across studies suggest that atypicalities in visual social attention in infants at high-risk for ASD during the first postnatal year may be subtle and more apparent under certain contexts. Here we explore factors that may moderate developmental trajectories in attention to faces, including the social complexity of the dynamic visual stimuli used to measure visual social attention and the early social environment of the infant as indexed by parental affectedness of ASD-related traits. Across infants at both high (HR) and low risk for ASD, attention to faces increased during the first postnatal year, with overall greater attention being allocated to schematic faces in the simpler video stimulus. Moreover, greater parental affectedness of ASD-related traits was associated with reduced developmental gains in attention to faces. For HR infants, greater attention to faces was positively associated with social communicative competence, including better joint attention skills and lower social impairments. Altogether, our findings highlight the importance of considering developmental level when selecting stimuli to longitudinally examine visual social attention, and the clinical relevance of including measures of infant\'s social environment in understanding early markers of ASD risk. Autism Res 2019, 12: 445-457 © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Attention to faces is an important means for infants to learn about the social world. The complexity of the social scene and an infant\'s early social environment both affect the amount of time infants at high- and low-risk for ASD look at faces during the first postnatal year. For infants at high-risk for ASD, greater attention to faces was associated with better social skills. Understanding an infant\'s social environment may have a positive impact on social communicative development.

We examined mechanisms underlying infants\' ability to categorize human biological motion stimuli from sex-typed walk motions, focusing on how visual attention to dynamic information in point-light displays (PLDs) contributes to infants\' social category formation. We tested for categorization of PLDs produced by women and men by habituating infants to a series of female or male walk motions and then recording posthabituation preferences for new PLDs from the familiar or novel category (Experiment 1). We also tested for intrinsic preferences for female or male walk motions (Experiment 2). We found that infant boys were better able to categorize PLDs than were girls and that male PLDs were preferred overall. Neither of these effects was found to change with development across the observed age range (∼4-18 months). We conclude that infants\' categorization of walk motions in PLDs is constrained by intrinsic preferences for higher motion speeds and higher spans of motion and, relatedly, by differences in walk motions produced by men and women.

We investigated how differences in infant sex and mothers\' dominance status affect infant rhesus macaques\' (Macaca mulatta) interest in visually exploring emotional facial expressions. Thirty-eight infants were presented with animated avatars of macaque facial expressions during the first month of life. Sons of high-ranking mothers looked more at faces, especially the eye region, than sons of low-ranking mothers, but no difference in looking duration was found for daughters. Males looked significantly more at eyes than females, but this effect was reversed in infants who were reared without mothers in a primate nursery facility. In addition, in mother-infant interactions, mothers of sons were more likely to gaze at their infant\'s face compared to mothers of daughters. Combined with previous research indicating that rhesus macaque mothers interact differently with infants based on their own rank and infant\'s sex, these results support the view that social experiences shape early face preferences in rhesus macaques.

We review different aspects of visual social attention in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) from infancy to adulthood in light of the eye-tracking literature. We first assess the assumption that individuals with ASD demonstrate a deficit in social orienting together with decreased attention to socially relevant stimuli such as faces compared to TD individuals. Results show that social orienting is actually not qualitatively impaired and that decreased attention to faces does not generalized across contexts. We also assess the assumption that individuals with ASD demonstrate excess mouth and diminished eye gaze compared to TD individuals. We find that this assumption receives little support across ages and discuss some factors that might have initially lead to this conjecture. We report that the assessment of the ability to follow the direction of another person\'s gaze needs to be further examined and that eye-tracking studies add to the evidence that individuals with ASD demonstrate difficulties in interpreting gaze cues. Finally, we highlight innovative data acquisition and analyses that are increasingly shedding light on the more subtle nature of the profound social difficulties experienced by individuals with ASD.