Eye tracking in an everyday environment reveals the interpersonal distance that affords infant-parent gaze communication

SMILEY-assistive application to support social and emotional skills in SPCD individuals

According to the available studies, mobile applications have provided significant support in improving the diverse skills of special individuals with social pragmatic communication disorder (SPCD). Over the last decade, SPCD has affected 8 to 11% of individuals, and therapy sessions cost between $50 and $150 per hour. This preliminary study aims to develop an interactive, user-friendly intervention to enhance social and emotional interaction skills in individuals with SPCD. The proposed intervention is an Android application that enhances social and emotional interaction skills. This pilot study involved 29 human subjects aged 7-13 years with pragmatic communication deficits. In a randomized controlled trial, the intervention was developed and implemented with consideration of caregiver and professional requirements. The improvement was analyzed using standard scales, including the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ) and the Social Communication Disorder Scale (SCDS). Moreover, the outcomes were examined through statistical parameters (mean, standard deviation) and tests (t-test). The intervention significantly improved the social and emotional skills of individuals with deficits. Before using the intervention, the identified statistical values for SCQ (mean = 6.48 and standard deviation = 3.37) and SCDS (mean = 8.17 and standard deviation = 4.79). However, after using the intervention, values for SCQ (mean = 8.24 and standard deviation = 3.95) and SCDS (mean = 9.48 and standard deviation = 4.72) were improved in comparison to the before-intervention outcome. The evaluation of the t-scores and p-values indicates that there has been significant improvement in the performance of individuals after the successful completion of the intervention. The proposed and applied intervention resulted in a significant impact in terms of improvement in social and emotional skills. The study concluded that it allows individuals to practice social and emotional interaction skills in a structured, controlled, and interactive environment. The proposed intervention has been found acceptable as per the reviews of caregivers and professionals, based on essential criteria including user experience, usability, interactive nature, reliability, and creditability.

The relationship between interpersonal distance preference and estimation accuracy in autism

People naturally seek an interpersonal distance that feels comfortable, striking a balance between not being too close or too far from others until reaching a state of equilibrium. Previous studies on interpersonal distance preferences among autistic individuals have yielded inconsistent results. Some show a preference for greater distance, while others indicate a preference for shorter distances, or reveal higher variance in preferences among autistic individuals. In a related vein, previous studies have also investigated the way autistics accurately judge distance, and these studies have received inconsistent results, with some showing superior spatial abilities and others indicating biases in distance estimations. However, the link between distance estimation and preference has never been examined. To address this gap, our study measured interpersonal distance preferences and estimations and tested the correlation between the two factors. The results indicate greater variance among autistic people in both the preference of distance and the ability to estimate distance accurately, suggesting that inconsistencies in previous studies originate from greater individual differences among autistics. Furthermore, only among autistic individuals were interpersonal distance preference and estimation bias associated in a manner that violated equilibrium. Underestimation bias (judging others as closer than they are) was linked to a preference for closer proximity, while overestimation bias (judging others as further away) was associated with a preference for maintaining a greater distance. This connection suggests that biases in the estimation of interpersonal distance contribute to extreme preferences (being too close or too far away). Taken together, the findings suggest that biases in the estimation of interpersonal distance are associated with socially inappropriate distance preferences among autistics.

Within arms reach: Physical proximity shapes mother-infant language exchanges in real-time

During everyday interactions, mothers and infants achieve behavioral synchrony at multiple levels. The ebb-and-flow of mother-infant physical proximity may be a central type of synchrony that establishes a common ground for infant-mother interaction. However, the role of proximity in language exchanges is relatively unstudied, perhaps because structured tasks-the common setup for observing infant-caregiver interactions-establish proximity by design. We videorecorded 100 mothers (U.S. Hispanic N = 50, U.S. Non-Hispanic N = 50) and their 13- to 23-month-old infants during natural activity at home (1-to-2 h per dyad), transcribed mother and infant speech, and coded proximity continuously (i.e., infants and mother within arms reach). In both samples, dyads entered proximity in a bursty temporal pattern, with bouts of proximity interspersed with bouts of physical distance. As hypothesized, Non-Hispanic and Hispanic mothers produced more words and a greater variety of words when within arms reach than out of arms reach. Similarly, infants produced more utterances that contained words when close to mother than when not. However, infants babbled equally often regardless of proximity, generating abundant opportunities to play with sounds. Physical proximity expands opportunities for language exchanges and infants' communicative word use, although babies accumulate massive practice babbling even when caregivers are not proximal.

Dynamics of the dyad: How mothers and infants co-construct interaction spaces during object play

Studies of dyadic interaction often examine infants' social exchanges with their caregivers in settings that constrain their physical properties (e.g., infant posture, fixed seating location for infants and adults). Methodological decisions about the physical arrangements of interaction, however, may limit our ability to understand how posture and position shape them. Here we focused on these embodied properties of dyadic interaction in the context of object play. We followed 30 mother-infant dyads across the first year of life (at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months) and observed them during 5 min of play with a standard set of toys. Using an interval-based coding system, we measured developmental change in infant posture, how mothers and infants positioned themselves relative to one another, and how they populated interaction spaces with objects. Results showed that mother-infant dyads co-constructed interaction spaces and that the contributions of each partner changed across development. Dyads progressively adopted a broader spatial co-orientation during play (e.g., positioned at right angles) across the first year. Moreover, advances in infants' postural skills, particularly increases in the use of independent sitting in real time, uniquely predicted change in dyadic co-orientation and infants' actions with objects, independent of age. Taken together, we show that the embodied properties of dyadic object play help determine how interactions are physically organized and unfold, both in real time and across the first year of life.

Bidding on the go: Links between walking, social actions, and caregiver responses in infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder

The development of walking is associated with a shift in how neurotypical infants initiate social interactions. Walking infants are more likely to locate objects in distant places, carry them, and then share those objects by approaching caregivers and using gestures to show or offer their discoveries (i.e., moving bids). The simultaneous organization of the behaviors necessary to generate moving bids requires the coordination of multiple skills-walking, fine motor skills, and gesturing. Infants with an elevated likelihood (EL) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit differences and delays in each of these behaviors. This study investigated interconnections between infant walking, social actions, and caregiver responses in 18-month-old EL infants with diverse developmental outcomes (ASD, non-ASD language delay, no diagnosis). We observed 85 infant-caregiver dyads at home during everyday activities for 45 minutes and identified all times when infants walked, instances of walking paired with social action (i.e., approaching the caregiver, approaching while carrying an object, producing a moving bid), and whether caregivers responded to their infants' social actions. There were no group differences in infants' production of social actions. Caregiver responses, however, were more clearly modulated by outcome group. While all caregivers were similarly and highly likely to respond to moving bids, caregivers of EL-ASD infants were substantially more likely to respond when their infants simply approached them (with or without an object in hand). Taken together, this research underscores the complexity of EL infant-caregiver interactions and highlights the role that each partner plays in shaping how they unfold.

Spintronic Eyeblink Gesture Sensor With Wearable Interface System

This work presents an eyeblink system that detects magnets placed on the eyelid via integrated magnetic sensors and an analogue circuit on an eyewear frame (without a glass lens). The eyelid magnets were detected using tunnelling magnetoresistance (TMR) bridge sensors with a sensitivity of 14 mV/V/Oe and were positioned centre-right and centre-left of the eyewear frame. Each eye side has a single TMR sensor wired to a single circuit, where the signal was filtered (<0.5 Hz and >30 Hz) and amplified to detect the weak magnetic field produced by the 3-millimetre (mm) diameter and 0.5 mm thickness N42 Neodymium magnets attached to a medical tape strip, for the adult-age demographic. Each eyeblink was repeated by a trigger command (right eyeblink) followed by the appropriate command, right, left or both eyeblinks. The eyeblink gesture system has shown repeatability, resulting in blinking classification based on the analogue signal amplitude threshold. As a result, the signal can be scaled and classified as well as, integrated with a Bluetooth module in real-time. This will enable end-users to connect to various other Bluetooth enabled devices for wireless assistive technologies. The eyeblink system was tested by 14 participants via a stimuli-based game. Within an average time of 185-seconds, the system demonstrated a group mean accuracy of 72% for 40 commands. Moreover, the maximum information transfer rate (ITR) of the participants was 35.95 Bits per minute.

Joint engagement in the home environment is frequent, multimodal, timely, and structured

Infants develop in a social context, surrounded by knowledgeable caregivers who scaffold learning through shared engagement with objects. However, researchers have typically examined joint engagement in structured tasks, where caregivers sit near infants and display frequent, prompt, and multimodal behaviors around the objects of infant action. Which features of joint engagement generalize to the real-world? Despite the importance of joint engagement for infant learning, critical assumptions around joint engagement in everyday interaction remain unexamined. We investigated behavioral and temporal features of joint engagement in the home environment, where objects for play abound and dyad proximity fluctuates. Infant manual actions, mother manual and verbal behaviors, and dyad proximity were coded frame-by-frame from 2-h naturalistic recordings of 13- to 23-month-old infants and their mothers (N = 38). Infants experienced rich, highly structured, multimodal mother input around the objects of their actions. Specifically, joint engagement occurred within seconds of infant action and was amplified in the context of interpersonal proximity. Findings validate laboratory-based research on characteristics of joint engagement while highlighting unique properties around the role of mother-infant proximity and temporal structuring of caregiver input over extended time frames. Implications for the social contexts that support infant learning and development are discussed.

Forced Gazing: A Stimulus-bound Behavior

We studied four patients with acquired brain injury who were compelled to gaze at a moving object or the face of an individual who came into their sight, especially the person's eyes. The patients continued to gaze at the object or person until it disappeared from their sight. This behavior, referred to as forced gazing, is related to visual groping (part of the instinctive grasp reaction), and, together with a similar sign of visual grasping, constitutes a spectrum of visual stimulus-bound behaviors. In addition to forced gazing, the patients exhibited a primitive reflex such as a grasp or sucking reflex. Each of the patients had lesions in the bilateral frontal lobes of the brain. We considered forced gazing to be a stimulus-bound behavior, in which patients become extremely dependent on a specific external stimulus. As gaze-related communication is considered one of the bases of an infant's social development, forced gazing may have its basis in innate human behavior that might manifest itself under specific pathological circumstances such as bilateral frontal-lobe damage.

"Dancing" Together: Infant-Mother Locomotor Synchrony

Pre-mobile infants and caregivers spontaneously engage in a sequence of contingent facial expressions and vocalizations that researchers have referred to as a social "dance." Does this dance continue when both partners are free to move across the floor? Locomotor synchrony was assessed in 13- to 19-month-old infant-mother dyads (N = 30) by tracking each partner's step-to-step location during free play. Although infants moved more than mothers, dyads spontaneously synchronized their locomotor activity. For 27 dyads, the spatiotemporal path of one partner uniquely identified the path of the other. Clustering analyses revealed two patterns of synchrony (mother-follow and yo-yo), and infants were more likely than mothers to lead the dance. Like face-to-face synchrony, locomotor synchrony scaffolds infants' interactions with the outside world.

Eye tracking in human interaction: Possibilities and limitations

There is a long history of interest in looking behavior during human interaction. With the advance of (wearable) video-based eye trackers, it has become possible to measure gaze during many different interactions. We outline the different types of eye-tracking setups that currently exist to investigate gaze during interaction. The setups differ mainly with regard to the nature of the eye-tracking signal (head- or world-centered) and the freedom of movement allowed for the participants. These features place constraints on the research questions that can be answered about human interaction. We end with a decision tree to help researchers judge the appropriateness of specific setups.

Head and body structure infants' visual experiences during mobile, naturalistic play

Infants’ visual experiences are important for learning, and may depend on how information is structured in the visual field. This study examined how objects are distributed in 12-month-old infants’ field of view in a mobile play setting. Infants wore a mobile eye tracker that recorded their field of view and eye movements while they freely played with toys and a caregiver. We measured how centered and spread object locations were in infants’ field of view, and investigated how infant posture, object looking, and object distance affected the centering and spread. We found that far toys were less centered in infants’ field of view while infants were prone compared to when sitting or upright. Overall, toys became more centered in view and less spread in location when infants were looking at toys regardless of posture and toy distance. In sum, this study showed that infants’ visual experiences are shaped by the physical relation between infants’ bodies and the locations of objects in the world. However, infants are able to compensate for postural and environmental constraints by actively moving their head and eyes when choosing to look at an object.

What are the building blocks of parent-infant coordinated attention in free-flowing interaction?

The present article investigated the composition of different joint gaze components used to operationalize various types of coordinated attention between parents and infants and which types of coordinated attention were associated with future vocabulary size. Twenty-five 9-month-old infants and their parents wore head-mounted eye trackers as they played with objects together. With high-density gaze data, a variety of coordinated attention bout types were quantitatively measured by combining different gaze components, such as mutual gaze, joint object looks, face looks, and triadic gaze patterns. The key components of coordinated attention that were associated with vocabulary size at 12 and 15 months included the simultaneous combination of parent triadic gaze and infant object looking. The results from this article are discussed in terms of the importance of parent attentional monitoring and infant sustained attention for language development.

Transition From Crawling to Walking Changes Gaze Communication Space in Everyday Infant-Parent Interaction

Acquisition of walking changes not only infants' locomotion itself but also infants' exploratory behavior and social interaction, such as gaze communication. To understand the ecological context in which gaze communication occurs and how it changes with walking development from the point of view of the spatial arrangement of infants, parents, and objects, we analyzed longitudinal data of daily eye contact scenes recorded from head-mounted eye trackers worn by parents as infants grew from 10 to 15.5 months, focusing on infant-parent distance and the number of objects between the dyad. A Bayesian state-space model revealed that the interpersonal distance at which infants initiated eye contact with their parents increased with the time ratio of walking to crawling. This result could not be explained by the developmental change in the amount of time that the infants were far from the parents, which is not limited to the gaze communication context. Moreover, the interpersonal distance at which the parents initiated eye contact with the infants did not increase with the time ratio of walking to crawling. The number of objects on the floor between infants and parents at the time of eye contact increased with interpersonal distance. Taken together, these results indicate that the transition from crawling to walking changes the ecological context in which infants initiate gaze communication to a visual environment characterized by a larger interpersonal distance and, therefore, more objects cluttered between the dyad. The present study has wider implications for the developmental change of shared attention in conjunction with walking development.