Preserved but Un-Sustained Responses to Bids for Dyadic Engagement in School-Age Children with Autism.

Purpose: Dynamic eye-tracking paradigms are an engaging and increasingly used method to study social attention in autism. While prior research has focused primarily on younger populations, there is a need for developmentally appropriate tasks for older children.

Methods: This study introduces a novel eye-tracking task designed to assess school-aged children's attention to speakers involved in conversation.

Automated measurement of infant and mother Duchenne facial expressions in the Face-to-Face/Still-Face.

Although still-face effects are well-studied, little is known about the degree to which the Face-to-Face/Still-Face (FFSF) is associated with the production of intense affective displays. Duchenne smiling expresses more intense positive affect than non-Duchenne smiling, while Duchenne cry-faces express more intense negative affect than non-Duchenne cry-faces. Forty 4-month-old infants and their mothers completed the FFSF, and key affect-indexing facial Action Units (AUs) were coded by expert Facial Action Coding System coders for the first 30 s of each FFSF episode.

Infant AFAR: Automated facial action recognition in infants.

Automated detection of facial action units in infants is challenging. Infant faces have different proportions, less texture, fewer wrinkles and furrows, and unique facial actions relative to adults. For these and related reasons, action unit (AU) detectors that are trained on adult faces may generalize poorly to infant faces.