Autism Test: Eye Movement May Help Diagnose Developmental Disorder

New research suggests that certain rapid eye movements could be a tell of the developmental disorder. These rapid eye movements the research investigates are not the well-known kind that are within the human sleep cycle, but rather are the movements our eyes make as we shift focus to another location in our field of vision. The saccades, as they are officially called, are an important neurological function that helps us interact with people and objects around us. "They are crucial for navigating, and also for orienting visual attention to spatial locations containing pertinent information," according to a study in the European Journal of Neuroscience, and in that way they may also provide some insight into autism. Read: Do the Genes for Autism Also Make You Smarter? "When these neural mechanisms fail, due to damage or disease or developmental disorder, the resultant changes in eye movements can suggest specific computational errors that may be responsible, and highlight brain regions where these computations are thought to occur," the authors explain. In healthy people, saccades are fast and accurate.