The eyes, so goes the ancient proverb, are the window to the soul. Sophisticated machines that track vision suggest that eyes may also be the window to autism.In the fall of 2002, clinicians at the Yale Child Study Center were testing 15-month-old Helen for developmental disorders. For most of her life, Helen had developed normally: smiling, then crawling, then walking, even saying a handful of words. But when she was about a year old, she stopped speaking. She stopped bringing things to her parents, and ignored new people.Her parents were especially worried because Helen's 3-year-old brother had been diagnosed with autism a year earlier. Their fears for their daughter were confirmed: after a battery of cognitive and behavioral tests, the specialists at Yale found that Helen, too, is autistic.In a way, Helen's visit was "serendipitous," says Ami Klin, a psychologist at the center. At the time, clinicians rarely saw an autistic child younger than age 2 or 3, so Helen provided a rare research opportunity.Klin and his colleague, Warren Jones, began observing the way Helen looked at people. In one experiment, they used infrared cameras mounted on a baseball cap to track her precise eye movements as she watched a video of a cooing woman's face. Unlike typical babies, Helen focused much more on the woman's mouth than on her eyes.Read more at...SFARI, April 2008.