Treating autism at a very young age can improve language skills and IQ scores. But the condition can be tough to detect in the very young, and often isn’t diagnosed until age 4 or so.
Researchers are trying to change that by studying children as young as a few months old, paying special attention to the eyes, the WSJ reports.
The video at left shows software that tracks how a baby looks at a human face. Most babies will look at a person’s eyes; if the person is speaking the baby will look at the mouth and other parts of the face. But researchers suspect autistic infants and toddlers tend to have different scanning patterns.
It’s still early days for the research, which is going on at labs at Yale and Canada’s McMaster University, among others.
