Oculomotor function in children and adolescents with autism, ADHD or co-occurring autism and ADHD

Abstract

Oculomotor characteristics, including accuracy, timing, and sensorimotor processing, are considered sensitive intermediate phenotypes for understanding the etiology of neurodevelopmental conditions, such as autism and ADHD. Oculomotor characteristics have predominantly been studied separately in autism and ADHD. Despite the high rates of co-occurrence between these conditions, only one study has investigated oculomotor processes among those with co-occurring autism + ADHD. Four hundred and five (n = 405; 226 males) Australian children and adolescents aged 4 to 18 years (M = 9.64 years; SD = 3.20 years) with ADHD (n = 64), autism (n = 66), autism + ADHD (n = 146), or neurotypical individuals (n = 129) were compared across four different oculomotor tasks: visually guided saccade, anti-saccade, sinusoidal pursuit and step-ramp pursuit. Confirmatory analyses were conducted using separate datasets acquired from the University of Nottingham UK (n = 17 autism, n = 22 ADHD, n = 32 autism + ADHD, n = 30 neurotypical) and University of Kansas USA (n = 29 autism, n = 41 neurotypical). Linear mixed effect models controlling for sex, age and family revealed that children and adolescents with autism + ADHD exhibited increased variability in the accuracy of the final saccadic eye position compared to neurotypical children and adolescents. Autistic children and adolescents demonstrated a greater number of catch-up saccades during step-ramp pursuit compared to neurotypical children and adolescents. These findings suggest that select differences in saccadic precision are unique to autistic individuals with co-occurring ADHD, indicating that measuring basic sensorimotor processes may be useful for parsing neurodevelopment and clinical heterogeneity in autism.