This study of gaze patterns in very young children with autism and their parents included 23 cases (with 16 fathers and 19 mothers) and 46 controls (with 14 fathers and 28 mothers). Children (mean age years) with autism met DSM-IV and ADOS-G diagnostic criteria. The participants’ gaze patterns were recorded while they viewed four simple movies that did not feature people. In children, severity of autism is related to spending more time watching irrelevant regions in one of the four movies. The mothers of children with autism showed an atypical pattern for three movies, whereas the fathers of children with autism did not show an atypical gaze pattern. The gaze pattern of the mothers was positively correlated with that of their children. The atypical viewing pattern of autistic individuals appears not to be restricted to people and social situations but is also seen in other situations, suggesting that there is a perceptual broad autism phenotype. 1. Introduction Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are a group of behaviorally defined disorders with impaired social interaction as a key feature, along with impairments in verbal and nonverbal communication and stereotyped and rigid patterns of behavior. There is evidence that these behavioral characteristics are accompanied by an atypical style of perception that is unique to autism [1–3]. Unlike individuals with other brain disorders, people with autism perform better than controls on tasks that involve the perception of low-level stimuli, such as discriminating visual luminance contrasts [2] and pure tones [3], but have a poorer performance on tasks involving complex stimuli [4]. The asymmetric perceptual pattern in autism has been explained using different but converging theoretical frameworks, such as the Weak Central Coherence Theory [5] and the Enhanced Perceptual Functioning model [6]. The main theme of these theoretical frameworks is that people with autism have difficulty (or are less inclined to) processing complex dynamic stimuli but are superior in processing simple static stimuli, leading to an atypical perceptual style. This atypical perceptual style may lead to difficulties in everyday life [7] if people with autism fail to identify and pay attention to relevant aspects of their environment. Failure to notice these stimuli could lead to different experiences and subsequently to different cognitive processes and behaviors during development [8], which in turn could lead to different perceptual styles, thereby forming a vicious cycle. Klin and colleagues argue that different perceptual preferences
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