Effective and efficient visual stimuli design for quantitative autism screening: An exploratory study

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the most common childhood developmental disorders. Early detection and intervention for ASD are critical for increasing child success. In the past decade, utilizing the abnormal eye gaze characteristics of children with autism in regard to certain visual stimuli is emerging as a screening approach due to its cost-efficiency and promising accuracy. However, the effect of visual stimulus on children with ASD has not been considered as a diagnostic consideration in the past. In this paper, we first create a visual stimuli database based on an extensive literature review, then we examine the impact of picture stimuli and exposure time on the quantitative accuracy of screenings for ASD. This is done by extracting gaze distribution in a 2D space and comparing children with ASD to typical peers using the 1st Wasserstein distance. A group of 32 participants with ASD and typical development (TD) were recruited for the study. The f-score accuracy results demonstrate the impact of implementing visual stimulus on screening for ASD. Our study demonstrates that the parsing of “social scene” stimulus with 5-second exposure time has the best performance at 98.24%.