From Kanner Austim to Asperger Syndromes, the Difficult Task to Predict Where ASD People Look at

Modelling the visual attention of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is attracting more and more interest. This consists in determining where ASD people look and in inferring the important visual features contributing to the gaze deployment. In this article, we investigate whether or not existing neurotypical as well as ASD saliency models perform well over the whole spectrum of autism. For this purpose, we propose two new eye-tracking datasets of ASD people in order to cover a large part of the autism spectrum, going from high-level functioning (e.g. Asperger) to low-level functioning (e.g. Kanner) autism. We demonstrate that current neurotypical and ASD models do not generalize well and perform well only on a small part of the spectrum. Our objective is to raise the awareness of computer scientists to the difficult task we are facing up when it comes to simulate the gaze deployment of ASD people.