Oculomotor behavior in children with autism spectrum disorders

Lay abstract To explore environment, people make saccades, that is, a rapid movement of eyes allowing to fixate the object of interest. Saccades can be produced more or less voluntarily needing specific cortical networks activation. Eye movements' studies provide an opportunity to understand how the brain works and to identify eventual brain circuits of a disease process. Concerning autism spectrum disorder in the literature, discordant findings have been reported on oculomotor behavior. In this study, we aimed to explore reflexive and voluntary saccades in a group of 32 children with autism spectrum disorder compared to 32 age-, sex- and IQ-matched typically developing children (control group). Eye movements were recorded using an eye tracker (Mobile EBT (R)). Overall, our findings suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder have dysfunction of cortical network responsible for saccade triggering. Particularly, in our study, we found that attentional and inhibitory deficits would be used as phenotypic indicators for children with autism spectrum disorder. In the future, it may be interesting to explore further attentional capabilities in subjects with autism spectrum disorder by comparing different types of oculomotor activities and it would be useful to combine these studies with neuroimaging data to explore the cortical activities related to eye movement's execution. Moreover, it could be also interesting to develop oculomotor training protocols in order to improve attention process with this type of patients.