Social attention as a cross-cultural transdiagnostic neurodevelopmental risk marker

Abstract

The primary objectives of this study were to evaluate the structure and age-related stability of social attention in English and Arabic-speaking youth and to compare social attention between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), other developmental disabilities (DD), and typically-developing controls. Eye-tracking data were collected from US (N = 270) and Qatari (N = 242) youth ages 1–17, including children evaluated for possible ASD. Participants viewed 44 stimuli from seven social paradigms. Fixation was computed for areas of interest within each stimulus. Latent variable models examined the structure of social attention. Generalized estimating equation models examined the effect o..