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Socially oriented attention in young children with neurofibromatosis type 1: An eye-tracking study
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Socially oriented attention in young children with neurofibromatosis type 1: An eye-tracking study

Kristina M Haebich, Darren R Hocking, Hayley Darke, Rachel Mackenzie, Kathryn N North, Giacomo Vivanti and Jonathan M Payne
Developmental medicine and child neurology, v 68(4), pp 541-548
Apr 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/dmcn.16497
PMID: 40908560
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
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https://doi.org/10.1111/dmcn.16497View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open CC BY-NC-ND V4.0

Abstract

To examine visual engagement to social stimuli and response to joint attention in young children with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) and typically developing peers (controls). Forty-five preschool children were studied cross-sectionally (mean age [SD] = 4 years 3 months [10 months]), 25 with NF1 and 20 typically developing controls. Participants passively viewed two eye-tracking paradigms. The first measured participants' time to first social fixation and duration of attention to social stimuli. The second assessed response to joint attention by recording the time taken to fixate on the target of an actor's eye gaze and the percentage of time maintaining joint attention. Compared to typically developing controls, children with NF1 were slower to fixate on social information (Cohen's d = 1.03, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.40-1.65), spent less time attending to social stimuli (d = -0.60, 95% CI = -1.27 to -0.01), and were slower to establish joint attention (rank-biserial correlation r = -0.49, 95% CI = -0.79 to -0.19). Slower fixation to social stimuli was associated with elevated autism traits (r = 0.41, p = 0.03) and lower social adaptive functioning (r = -0.49, p = 0.02) in children with NF1. Our findings in preschool children build on previous evidence of diminished attention to social information in school-age children with NF1 and could inform early interventions to ameliorate the impact of reduced social attention on everyday social functioning in this population.

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Clinical Neurology
Pediatrics
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