How interested a child with autism is in a social scene can be determined in the blink of an eye — literally.That was the message from scientists who yesterday presented a new method for measuring blink rate during visual perception tasks at the IMFAR 2010 conference in Philadelphia.Eye-tracking studies of children with autism have shown that they view the world in unusual ways. For example, when they look at a face, toddlers with autism as young as 15 months tend to spend more time looking at the mouth or other peripheral features, rather than at the eyes.Just because these children look at a particular spot does not mean they think it's important, however."We wanted to develop a measure that would allow us to quantify, on a moment-by-moment basis, how engaged a person is in what they're attending to," says Sarah Shultz, a graduate student in the laboratory of Ami Klin at the Yale Child Study Center.Read more at...SFARI, May 2010.