Do Autistic and Normal Developing Children Behave Differently When They are Presented with Sad Face Emotion

Abstract

This paper compares the visual behavior of normal developing children and autistic children when both groups are presented with human emotion of sad face. We used eye tracking system to capture and tracks the child's eye gaze movements as they watch a short video of a human's dynamic facial expression evolving from static emotion to sad emotion. With the human face, we have created three areas of interests. Our data analysis focused on where specifically in the stimulus the child was looking at, with a significant difference was found between the two groups. The study also reveals that most autistic participants express little interest in the eyes and mouth of a sad facial expression compared to normal developing children, evident by the time spent on off-facial area.