Reflections on Eye-tracking

Reflections on Eye-tracking

Reflecting on this study done by Dr. Klin of Yale’s Child Study Center, we can begin to relate the way early childhood television watching could affect a child predisposed to autism spectrum disorders. Upon typically socially developing people take for granted that they assume/fill-in the gaps of what televisions figures (like cartoon characters and representations of real people and animals) are and what they are socially doing and socially meaning. They are either live recordings of people and animals, or they are movies, shows, and cartoons that use the audience’s prior social knowledge to interact with people watching television. But with toddlers growing up with autism, Klin’s study suggests that those toddlers understand television figures as only or mostly as moving lines, shapes, and dots with corresponding sounds. But the toddlers with autism are not able or it is extremely difficult for them to understand or begin to fill-in what those figures on-screen mean socially.

Let’s note what a child, who has a predisposition toward this social developmental disorder of autism notices as they become more involved with television watching and what the typically developing children notices as they become more involved in television watching. To understand the sounds and motions of the television as providing typical social cues, the typically developing child has to be able to also pick up on social interaction cues with other people. If the child has a predisposition towards the autism spectrum then they are learning what the television’s actions are doing rather than learning what the television is socially relating to the viewer from a broader social sphere, their young developing mind is still zealously making connections, and eventually the young child will begin to settle on the socialization habits of the television programming itself.

So the child who has a predisposition towards autism, would trend towards
the more limited social development provided by the television, and the typically developing child would have more access to broader biological and physiological socialization along with television programming. So, the child with a predisposition toward autism would become, first much more attune to what television’s on-screen actions are, which lack the biological and physiological structures of social development and then the child would become more attune to television programming’s socialization which provides a more confining social development sphere.

Since television watching cannot provide the same biological and physiological basis for the toddlers’ socialization as other humans can, and television watching cannot provide the same basis of general experience/exploration for the toddler to their world around them, a child who was prone to and became socialized by the television would experience a more difficulty interacting in a broader social sphere. Nor do I think the inventors and current developers of television would claim that television was meant to substitute a broader social sphere, since its programming is largely contingent on the happenings of the broader social sphere. Television viewing is intended to be understood, within the larger social and exploratory spheres, but it can go from a smaller context, to the main socializing context for children predisposed to autism. This brings up our concern that television may not be an acting impetus for autism, but simply an avenue that children with autism can tend towards.

This is a legitimate concern, but I think that this concern can be eased. Whether you believe that early childhood television watching is an impetus for autism or whether you believe that children with autism are predisposed to focusing on relating with television programming, or whether you adhere to certain qualities in both views; either way, there is a relationship and how much of this relationship that we investigate is not up to us, it is up to the how much it helps a person with autism.


sources:

Bruce Bower. “Autism Immerses 2-year-olds in a Synchronized World.” (Science News, April 2009, www.sciencenews.org).