Impaired representational gaze following in children with autism spectrum disorder

• Spontaneous gaze following in young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
• Spontaneous gaze following toward hidden objects.
• Eye-tracking study with a dynamic and original stimuli.
• Children with ASD were less accurate in representational gaze following than controls.
• ASD group showed reduced looking time at the attended representational object.

Using eye-tracking methodology, we compared spontaneous gaze following in young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (mean age 5.8 years) to that of typically developing children (mean age 5.7 years). Participants saw videos in which the position of a hidden object was either perceptually visible or was only represented in another person’s mind. The findings indicate that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder were significantly less accurate in gaze following and observed the attended object for less time than typically developing children only in the Representational Condition. These results show that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are responsive to gaze as a perceptual cue although they ignore its representational meaning.