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Visual Fixation Patterns during Reciprocal Social Interaction Distinguish a Subgroup of 6-Month-Old Infants At-Risk for Autism from Comparison Infants
Abstract
Thirty-one infant siblings of children with autism and 24 comparison infants were tested at 6 months of age during social interaction with a caregiver, using a modified Still Face paradigm conducted via a closed-circuit TV-video system. In the Still Face paradigm, the mother interacts with the infant, then freezes and displays a neutral, expressionless face, then resumes interaction. Eye tracking data on infant visual fixation patterns were recorded during the three episodes of the experiment. Using a hierarchical cluster analysis, we identified a subgroup of infants demonstrating diminished gaze to the mother's eyes relative to her mouth during the Still Face episode. Ten out of the 11 infants in this subgroup had an older sibling with autism.
... One of these signs is anomalous eye contact, which usually replaces the physical interaction by the ninth month of age (6). The inability to have eye contact with people and the aversion to looking at faces are important suspect signs (7,8). ...
... Often parents note that their children seem to avoid looking at them, or "look right through them. " In this scenario, the term implies the focus of the child within himself, and gaze aversion gives a limitation of interaction with other than self (7). Since the oculomotor system is essential for the development of the voluntary behavior, and its maturation is considered as paradigmatic of brain maturational processes (9)(10)(11), these features raised the suspicion that ASD also included a visual disturbance, so different studies considered the visual deficits in ASD patients (3,(12)(13)(14)(15). ...
Purpose
Given the known difficulty in sensory processing and in motor skills in patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and since visual impairment could interfere with children’s behaviour, early detection and management of visual-motor difficulties are crucial. This exploratory study aims to evaluate the visual-motor status in a cohort of children affected by ASD.
Methods
The records of patients affected by ASD and admitted between 2018 and 2022 to the Pediatric University Hospital of Verona were reviewed. Best Corrected Visual Acuity, cycloplegic refraction, stereopsis, convergence, complete ocular motility, strabismus examination, slit-lamp anterior segment examination and fundus ophthalmoscopy were collected and reviewed.
Results
A total of 253 patients (203 ASD and 50 healthy controls) were included in the study. A higher number of total orthoptic defects were detected in the ASD group, in comparison with the control group. Specifically, a higher percentage of stereopsis deficit and convergence insufficiency was observed.
Conclusion
In our cohort of children with ASD stereopsis deficit, convergence insufficiency and refractive errors are the most observed ocular conditions. These findings are consistent with the known alterations of motor skills and sensory processing in ASD. Moreover, our study supports the hypothesis that visual acuity is not compromised in children with ASD. As a result, a complete ophthalmic evaluation is highly recommended in children with ASD, to guarantee early detection and treatment of possible visual-motor defects.
... Therefore, a number of studies have repeatedly verified the presence of differences in this pattern in children at risk of manifesting ASD during their development, in comparison with children with typical development (TD). These studies show that ASD children pay less attention to the eyes of an adult in natural, face-to-face situations of interaction, such as when paying attention to static faces, faces which speak or faces which draw joint attention to objects (Chawarska et al., 2012;Fujioka et al., 2020;Gliga et al., 2012;Jones et al., 2008;Know et al., 2019;Merin et al., 2007;Nyström et al., 2019). However, the differences can be subtle, depending on the task (Wang et al., 2022). ...
... This is a robust effect which corroborates once again the wellestablished and well-known fact of reduced eye contact with the interlocutor of ASD children. This starts from the age of six months in situations of natural face-to-face interaction, of joint attention or attention to a static or dynamic face (Chawarska et al., 2012;Jones et al., 2008;Know et al., 2019;Merin et al., 2007;Nyström et al., 2019;Shic et al., 2014;Wang et al., 2022;Wass et al., 2015). ...
The aim was to test the use of eye-tracking methodology for the early detection of ASD in a task of association between unfamiliar objects and pseudowords. Significant differences were found between ASD (n = 57) and TD (n = 57) Spanish speaking toddlers in the number and time of fixation. The TD children showed more and longer fixations on eyes and mouth while the ASD children attended almost exclusively to objects, making it difficult to integrate lexical and phonological information. Moreover, the TD toddlers looked at the mouth when the pseudoword was produced while the ASD toddlers did not. Gaze fixation on eyes and mouth during word learning recorded by eye-tracking may be used as a biomarker for the early diagnosis of ASD.
... Table 3 shows that the articles with the highest number of citations are mainly focused on the analysis of face processing and social interactions. The majority of these articles investigated differences in eye movements during the observation of visual stimuli related to social cues or social interactions, such as images or videos depicting faces [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] or social scenes/interactions [39][40][41][42][43][44]. ...
... Indeed, an analysis of the most cited articles retrieved in our search and related to autism identified social interactions and face processing as the most investigated field. The majority of these articles used eye tracking to investigate differences in gaze patterns during vision exposure to social stimuli, such as faces or social events, either in patients with autism [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]37,38,[40][41][42][43], in their siblings [26,36] or participants at risk of autism [39] compared with typically developing controls. Some of these studies combined eye tracking with additional techniques such as MRI in order to investigate whether the identified differences in gaze patterns were associated with neurobiological abnormalities [26,27,45]. ...
Eye tracking provides a quantitative measure of eye movements during different activities. We report the results from a bibliometric analysis to investigate trends in eye tracking research applied to the study of different medical conditions. We conducted a search on the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) database and analyzed the dataset of 2456 retrieved articles using VOSviewer and the Bibliometrix R package. The most represented area was psychiatry (503, 20.5%) followed by neuroscience (465, 18.9%) and psychology developmental (337, 13.7%). The annual scientific production growth was 11.14% and showed exponential growth with three main peaks in 2011, 2015 and 2017. Extensive collaboration networks were identified between the three countries with the highest scientific production, the USA (35.3%), the UK (9.5%) and Germany (7.3%). Based on term co-occurrence maps and analyses of sources of articles, we identified autism spectrum disorders as the most investigated condition and conducted specific analyses on 638 articles related to this topic which showed an annual scientific production growth of 16.52%. The majority of studies focused on autism used eye tracking to investigate gaze patterns with regards to stimuli related to social interaction. Our analysis highlights the widespread and increasing use of eye tracking in the study of different neurological and psychiatric conditions.
... Another approach allowing social reciprocity and the recording of social gaze behavior over time, are live video-based interactions (e.g. Auyeung et al., 2015;Merin et al., 2007). The participant interacts with the stimulus person via videoconference. ...
... There has been a shift in research towards using more naturalistic stimuli: from dynamic stimuli (Domes et al., 2013), and small video sequences (Coutrot et al., 2016), to the use of video-mediated interaction (Auyeung et al., 2015;Merin et al., 2007). In the most recent approaches two participants interact through a mirror system that allows direct eye contact via video-mediated dyadic interaction and records high quality data (Hessels et al., 2017). ...
To understand social attention in human interaction, we need to study humans in actual interaction. Visual social attention is one of the most fundamental tools for human interaction. Until now, studies mostly investigated social attention to static stimuli. But there is growing evidence that such findings fall short of predicting social attention in real-world interactions. We are in need of a paradigm allowing us to record gaze behavior during naturalistic social encounters. This study intro-duces a novel, naturalistic dyadic eye-tracking paradigm using remote eye track-ers and evaluates its feasibility. The quality of eye-tracking metrics was scruti-nized in five experiments of different design relevant for dyadic eye-tracking stud-ies. We found the that dual tracking setup’s data quality is comparable to the standard application of remote eye trackers in a screen setup, and that it re-mained stable over time and was unaffected by temporary disruptions in the tracker-to-eye-connection. The effect of the face’s three-dimensionality on data quality was negligible, whereas moving the stimulus along the z-axis caused a considerable loss in accuracy. In sum, this study provides first evidence that the quality of eye-tracking data collected in the dual eye-tracking paradigm suffices to analyze gaze behavior in naturalistic dyadic interactions. Further investigation is required to determine the influence of participants’ movement on data quality.
... Data quality An important advantage of head-boxed setups compared to head-free setups is the increase in the quality of the eye-tracking data provided, which allows for analysis of the more fine-grained details in gaze behavior, such as which region of the face is being looked at. The greater precision and accuracy of eye trackers typically used in head-boxed setups is demonstrated by Merin, Young, Ozonoff, and Rogers (2007), who investigated whether infants who had siblings with ASD showed different gaze behavior than comparison infants when reacting to a modified "still face" paradigm (i.e., a paradigm where there was first normal interaction between the mother and infant, followed by a sudden period of the mother being completely expressionless, after which normal interaction resumed again). Merin et al. differentiated between gaze to the eyes, mouth, and other face regions, and found that there was a subgroup of infants who looked less at the eyes of the mother relative to the mouth when the still face was presented. ...
... Hessels et al. differentiated between gaze directed at the left eye, right eye, nose, and mouth, and found that participants looked longer at the other participant's eyes when compared to other parts of their face. These examples, as well as other interaction research done with head-boxed setups show how they can be used to look at gaze behavior with greater resolution compared to wearable eye trackers (Haith et al., 1977;Hessels, Holleman, Cornelissen, Hooge, & Kemner, 2018;Merin et al., 2007;von dem Hagen & Bright, 2017). ...
There is a long history of interest in looking behavior during human interaction. With the advance of (wearable) video-based eye trackers, it has become possible to measure gaze during many different interactions. We outline the different types of eye-tracking setups that currently exist to investigate gaze during interaction. The setups differ mainly with regard to the nature of the eye-tracking signal (head- or world-centered) and the freedom of movement allowed for the participants. These features place constraints on the research questions that can be answered about human interaction. We end with a decision tree to help researchers judge the appropriateness of specific setups.
... There is some evidence that differences in facial scanning may also extend to more dynamic and socially meaningful stimuli. Merin, Young, Ozonoff, and Rogers (2007) examined infants' looking patterns during the Still Face paradigm with their mothers. In the Still Face paradigm, caregivers are asked to gaze at their infants with a flat, unresponsive affect. ...
... This typically produces distress and confusion in infants. Merin et al. (2007) identified a subgroup of 6-month-old infants with increased mouth-looking versus eye-looking during the procedure; 10 of the 11 infants in this cluster were from a group of vulnerable siblings. However, membership in this elevated mouth-looking cluster was not predictive of eventual ASD outcome (G&G 3), and actually predicted better language skills at 18 months of age (Young, Merin, Rogers, & Ozonoff, 2009). ...
Endophenotypes are measurable markers of genetic vulnerability to current or future disorder. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is well-suited to be examined within an endophenotype framework given past and current emphases on the broader autism phenotype and early detection. We conducted a scoping review to identify potential socially-related endophenotypes of ASD. We focused on paradigms related to sociality (e.g., theory of mind (TOM), social attention), which comprise most of this literature. We integrated findings from traditional behavioral paradigms with brain-based measures (e.g., electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging). Broadly, infant research regarding social attention and responsivity (Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) domain of affiliation) and attention to faces and voices (social communication) finds consistent abnormality in vulnerable infant siblings. Several additional paradigms that have shown differences in vulnerable infants and young children include animacy perception tasks (perception and understanding of others), measures of recognition and response to familiar faces (attachment), and joint attention and false-belief tasks (understanding mental states). Research areas such as alexithymia (the perception and understanding of self), empathic responding, and vocal prosody may hold interest; however, challenges in measurement across populations and age ranges is a limiting factor. Future work should address sex differences and age dependencies, specificity to ASD, and heterogeneous genetic pathways to disorder within samples individuals with ASD and relatives.
... Fourth, this study confirmed that no significant difference between the BAP and control groups could be found in the gaze proportion at the eyes and mouth, contrary to previous studies based on ASD (Setien-Ramos et al., 2022;Riddiford et al., 2022). As some studies have reported that the BAP group also looked at the eyes less and mouth longer than the general population, follow-up studies will be needed to confirm the relationship between the BAP and the gaze pattern on the eyes and mouth (Merin et al., 2007). Fifth, in this study, the BAP and control groups didn't show Fig. 3. Comparison of gaze proportion between groups under the condition of mild emotional intensity in congruent and incongruent conditions of ECT. ...
Background/objective:
Individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP) showed a diminished ability to recognize emotion. This study aims to examine whether their decline in emotion recognition ability could be more clearly identified as task complexity increased and whether their decline could be influenced by their eye-gaze patterns.
Method:
41 individuals with BAP and 40 healthy controls performed two types of emotion recognition tasks. After confirming conditions wherein the BAP group did not perform well compared to the control group, we compared gaze proportion on faces and context between groups when performing the conditions.
Results:
The more difficult the task, the clearer the significant relationships between the level of autistic traits and emotion recognition ability. The BAP group showed lower accuracy compared to the control group when a face with mild emotional intensity was presented with context. In terms of gaze proportion, the BAP group looked less at faces when recognizing emotions compared to the control group.
Conclusion:
These findings indicate that diminished emotion recognition ability in individuals with BAP may be influenced by face gaze.
... Ông đã đưa ra kết luận rằng, các đối tượng mắc chứng tự kỷ đã dành ít thời gian hơn so với người bình thường để kiểm tra ở các đặc điểm cốt lõi của khuôn mặt (mắt, mũi và miệng) 6 để xác định cảm xúc của người khác 7 . Năm 2006, Merin và các cộng sự kết luận, trẻ sơ sinh có sự suy giảm ánh nhìn ở mắt và nhìn chằm chằm vào miệng của các bà mẹ 8 . Năm 2007, Spezio và các cộng sự đã sử dụng Eye Tracking cùng với một phương pháp mới để thực hiện các kích thích, nhằm điều tra về khuôn mặt mà đối tượng đang quan sát để nhận ra biểu cảm cảm xúc 9 . ...
A number of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are growing to become a big problem in society at the present time. Autism is the neurological disorder that makes the children feel inferior in social communication. Identifying individuals with early autism (under 3 years of age) is difficult and there is still not any medical test for rapid detection of autism. Currently, the clinical diagnosis is mainly based on the observed behavior of the child, and besides, educational and psychological tests are also applied. Eye movements have an important role in an individual's perception and attention in social activities. Non-invasive detection and tracking techniques of the eye movement have been developed over many decades. Nowadays, the Eye Tracking is a technological process that enables the measurement of eye movements, eye positions, and points of gaze. In other words, eye tracking identifies and collects a person’s visual data of the eyes in terms of location, objects and duration. It is applied for a variety of different research methods to investigate human behavior. In particular, the Eye Tracking method makes an application for identifying people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), it has been not only a wide study but also a great interest in recent years. This article provided an overview of children's visual attention with Autism Spectrum Disorder and children with Typical Development (TD). The study has focused on exploring the difference in observed behavior of ASD children and TD children. This study used the DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) clustering algorithm for grouping a set of Eye Tracking data, which were collected by the test of children’s visual attention to a variety of images. The classification of Eye Tracking data was based on the feature parameters, which were extracted from analyzing data. Moreover, a model for classification and identification of Eye Tracking image data of children groups with ASD and TD was built on Deep Learning algorithms. In this study, the chosen algorithm was Multilayer Perceptron. The children's eye movements dataset was extracted from the paper "A dataset of eye movements for the children with autism spectrum disorder" by Huiyu Duan et al. The results showed that using the Eye Tracking data is highly promising in identifying children with ASD by analyzing the observed behavior of children on images, especially on human images.
... Children at risk of developing social-communicative delays often exhibit impairments in one-or more-modality of emotional communication (e.g., Cassel et al., 2007;Lambert-Brown et al., 2015;Merin et al., 2007). The findings of the present study provide unique insights into normative development of infant emotional communication with different social partners, which have implications for clinical practice, including implementation and advancement of screening tools, diagnosis, and intervention programs. ...
Interaction with unfamiliar partners is a component of social life from infancy onward. Yet little is known about preverbal communication with strangers. This study compared the development of infant communication with strangers to communication with mothers and fathers and examined the contribution of temperament to partner‐specific communication patterns. A sample of 58 infants was observed at four and eight months during separate home‐based face‐to‐face interactions with three partners (mother, father, and stranger). Infant visual, facial, and vocal communication behaviors were coded microanalytically. Each parent reported on infant temperament at both ages. Multilevel regression analyses indicated that infants gazed longer at strangers than at fathers, exhibited less smiling to strangers than to mothers, and produced fewer vocalizations with strangers than with either parent. Both age and temperament moderated these differences. Vocal communication with fathers became more frequent at eight months; smiling to mothers was accentuated among infants with higher levels of temperamental surgency. Importantly, levels of communication behaviors with strangers were concurrently and longitudinally associated with those with mothers and fathers. Overall, findings suggest that infant emotional communication patterns are modulated by individual temperamental differences and are reproduced in and over time, though at different levels, when interacting with novel partners.
... In the past decades, deficits in eye gaze have been widely studied using eye-tracking methodologies in a variety of contexts. Some researchers reported that children and adolescents with ASD spent less time looking at eyes than TD controls (Hosozawa et al., 2012;Jones et al., 2008;Norbury et al., 2009;Rice et al., 2012;Speer et al., 2007), and diminished attention to eyes is present at early months of infants later diagnosed with autism (Jones et al., 2008;Merin et al., 2007). Although the evidence regarding this impairment is mixed, meta-analyses of eyetracking studies in ASD children suggest significant overall reduced attention to eyes (Papagiannopoulou et al., 2014). ...
Previous studies have shown reduced attention to the eyes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, most eye-tracking evidence regarding this impairment has been derived from passive viewing tasks. Here, we compared the passive viewing of faces with an active task involving face identification with morphing faces. While typical controls prioritized the eyes over other facial features regardless of viewing condition, autistic children exhibited reduced eye-looking in passive viewing, but displayed increased attention allocation to the eyes when instructed to identify faces. The proportional eye-looking in ASD during facial recognition was negatively related to the autism symptoms severity. These findings provide evidence regarding the specific situations in which diminished eye-looking may rise in young ASD children.
... Other studies found no significant difference between HR and LR siblings (Rozga et al., 2011). However, most previous studies have focused more on the HR siblings later diagnosed with ASD (e.g., Chawarska, Macari, & Shic, 2013;Klin et al., 2009;Ozonoff et al., 2010;Pierce et al., 2011;Webb et al., 2010;Zwaigenbaum et al. 2005), or did not distinguish HR siblings with ASD from HR siblings without ASD (e.g., Dundas, Gastgeb, & Strauss, 2012;Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007;Rutherford, 2013). Few studies have focused on the early development of HR siblings without ASD from the perspective of social attention using objective measurements. ...
The present study explored the early development of social attention of toddlers at high familial risk (HR) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eighteen HR toddlers and twenty-two toddlers at low familial risk for ASD (LR) between 11 and 24 months were asked to watch paired social and non-social videos. We found that: (1) the initial social preference in HR group decreased with age, but not in LR group; (2) both groups showed significant social habituation across trials, but HR group habituated slightly slower as age increased. These findings suggest that atypical social attention could be an early characteristic of toddlers at high familial risk for ASD.
... Table 2 summarizes studies in which emerging markers over the first 12 months of life were assessed. 22,32,38,45,46,48,49,[71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78] Some researchers reported no behavioral differences at the age of 6 months in social communication behaviors 22 or in language or motor development 49,66 between infants who were later di-agnosed with ASD and those with a later diagnosis of typical development. Other studies, which have also included outcome measures, suggest that there may be differences during the age range of 6 to 12 months in social attention (social gaze or orienting to name being called), 32,74 atypical sensory behaviors, 32 repetitive or otherwise atypical motor behaviors, and nonverbal communication (differences in gesture use). ...
This custom collection consists of important studies, expert recommendations, and practice pathways that inform pediatricians on practical ways to improve the lives of children with ASD and their families.
https://shop.aap.org/pediatric-collections-autism-spectrum-disorder-paperback/
... In their comprehensive review, Ed Sucksmith, Ilona Roth, and Rosa Anna Hoekstra (2011) discuss a number of studies investigating the so-called broader autism phenotype (BAP). BAP may be characterized as a collection of subthreshold traits frequently found in the relatives of people diagnosed with autism, and especially in younger siblings (Merin et al. 2007). These milder manifestations of the condition usually consist of a wide range of features, such as delayed language development (Constantino et al. 2006) and social difficultiesfor example, atypical gaze shift and reduced initiation of joint attention (Presmanes et al. 2007). ...
The notions of at-risk and subthreshold conditions are increasingly discussed in psychiatry to describe mild, brief, or otherwise atypical syndromes that fail to meet the criteria for clinical relevance. However, the concept of vulnerability is still underexplored in philosophy of psychiatry. This article discusses psychiatric vulnerability to clarify some conceptual issues about the various factors contributing to vulnerability, the notions of risk and protection, and the idea that there are multiple ways of crossing the threshold to clinical relevance. My goal is to lay the groundwork for a finer-grained discussion on psychiatric vulnerability that reflects the complex nature of mental conditions and illustrates the kind of thinking needed in clinical practice.
... In their comprehensive review, Ed Sucksmith, Ilona Roth, and Rosa Anna Hoekstra (2011) discuss a number of studies investigating the so-called broader autism phenotype (BAP). BAP may be characterized as a collection of subthreshold traits frequently found in the relatives of people diagnosed with autism, and especially in younger siblings (Merin et al. 2007). These milder manifestations of the condition usually consist of a wide range of features, such as delayed language development (Constantino et al. 2006) and social difficultiesfor example, atypical gaze shift and reduced initiation of joint attention (Presmanes et al. 2007). ...
The notions of at-risk and subthreshold conditions are increasingly discussed in psychiatry to describe mild, brief, or otherwise atypical syndromes that fail to meet the criteria for clinical relevance. However, the concept of vulnerability is still underexplored in philosophy of psychiatry. This article discusses psychiatric vulnerability to clarify some conceptual issues about the various factors contributing to vulnerability, the notions of risk and protection, and the idea that there are multiple ways of crossing the threshold to clinical relevance. My goal is to lay the groundwork for a finer-grained discussion on psychiatric vulnerability that reflects the complex nature of mental conditions and illustrates the kind of thinking needed in clinical practice.
... Social orienting is a tendency to prefer social stimuli (e.g., human face) to non-social stimuli (e.g., geometric pattern); dyadic engagement is an interaction between the child and another person. Typically, dyadic engagement is measured as the amount of time a child maintains eye contact on the mother's eyes divided by the time spent looking at the mouth (Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007;Young, Merin, Rogers, & Ozonoff, 2009). Dyadic engagement differs from joint attention in a sense that dyadic engagement occurs purely between a child and another person in which any third object is required. ...
In children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), joint attention is regarded as a predictor of language function, social skills, communication, adaptive function, and intelligence. However, existing information about the association between joint attention and intelligence is limited. Most such studies have examined children with low intelligence. For this study, we investigated whether joint attention is related to intelligence in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) without severe intellectual disability. We analyzed 113 children with ASD aged 40–98 months. Their Kaufman Assessment Battery (K-ABC) Mental Processing Index (MPI) scores are 60 and more (mean 93.4). We evaluated their intelligence using K-ABC and evaluated their joint attention using ADOS-2. After we performed simple regression analyses using K-ABC MPI and its nine subscales as dependent variables, using joint attention as the independent variable, we identified joint attention as a positive predictor of the MPI and its two subscales. From this result, we conclude that joint attention is related to intelligence in young children with ASD without severe intellectual disability. This result suggests a beneficial effect of early intervention targeting joint attention for children with ASD.
Lay Summary
Joint attention is the ability to coordinate visual attention with another person and then shift one's gaze toward an object or event. Impairment of joint attention is regarded as an early marker of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study revealed impairment of joint attention as associated with lower intelligence in ASD children. These results are expected to constitute a rationale for future studies, particularly addressing beneficial effects of early intervention targeting joint attention for children with ASD.
... Haith and colleagues for instance report that between 3 and 11 weeks of age, participating infants looked ten times longer at the eyes than at the mouth even if the person was talking [50]. At 6-months of age, infants start looking longer at the mouth, though the eyes still form the major attraction of the face [60,90]. It is around this age that infants start babbling [30,99]. ...
When newly born into this world, there is an overwhelming multitude of things to learn, ranging from learning to speak to learning how to solve a mathematical equation. Amidst this abundance, action perception is developing already in the first months of life. Why would learning about others’ actions be among the first items to acquire? What is the relevance of action perception for young infants? Part of the answer probably lies in the strong dependence on others. Newborn human infants need caretakers even for fulfilling their basic needs. Weak neck muscles make it hard for them to lift up their head, and most of their movements come across as uncoordinated. Clearly, getting themselves a drink or dressing themselves is not part of their repertoire. Their reliance on their caregivers makes these caregivers and their actions important for the young infant. Seeing that the caregiver responds to their calls can already reduce some of the stress that comes with being so dependent. As such, it is helpful for an infant to learn to distinguish different actions of the caregiver. Not only are the caregivers’ actions focused on the infant’s physical needs, but also on helping the infant to regulate her emotions. Parents typically comfort a baby by softly rocking them, and by talking and smiling to them. Social interaction between caregiver and infant thus starts immediately after birth, and these interactions help them to bond. In the context of social interaction, it is useful to be able to distinguish a smile from a frown. Interpreting the facial actions of others is vital to successful communication. Moreover, in the period in which infants are still very limited in their own actions, observing others’ actions forms a main resource for learning about the world. Making sense of others’ actions is therefore of central importance already during early development.
... Guillon and colleagues further found little evidence that ASD is associated with excessive mouth and reduced eye gaze. The ratio of eye to mouth gaze during the observation of an engaging partner does not predict clinical outcome of children with ASD (Chawarska et al., 2013;Elsabbagh et al., 2014;Merin et al., 2007;Shic et al., 2014;Young et al., 2009). Rather than being predictive of poor clinical development, increased mouth fixations are associated with better language outcome at 24 and 36 months irrespective of later clinical diagnosis (Elsabbagh et al., 2014;Young et al., 2009). ...
Humans in our environment are of special importance to us. Even if our minds are fixated on tasks unrelated to their presence, our attention will likely be drawn towards other people’s appearances and their actions. While we might remain unaware of this attentional bias at times, various studies have demonstrated the preferred visual scanning of other humans by recording eye movements in laboratory settings. The present thesis aims to investigate the circumstances under and the mechanisms by which this so-called social attention operates. The first study demonstrates that social features in complex naturalistic scenes are prioritized in an automatic fashion. After 200 milliseconds of stimulus presentation, which is too brief for top-down processing to intervene, participants targeted image areas depicting humans significantly more often than would be expected from a chance distribution of saccades. Additionally, saccades towards these areas occurred earlier in time than saccades towards non-social image regions. In the second study, we show that human features receive most fixations even when bottom-up information is restricted; that is, even when only the fixated region was visible and the remaining parts of the image masked, participants still fixated on social image regions longer than on regions without social cues. The third study compares the influence of real and artificial faces on gaze patterns during the observation of dynamic naturalistic videos. Here we find that artificial faces, belonging to humanlike statues or machines, significantly predicted gaze allocation but to a lesser extent than real faces. In the fourth study, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural correlates of reflexive social attention. Analyses of the evoked blood-oxygenation level dependent responses pointed to an involvement of striate and extrastriate visual cortices in the encoding of social feature space. Collectively, these studies help to elucidate under which circumstances social features are prioritized in a laboratory setting and how this prioritization might be achieved on a neuronal level. The final experimental chapter addresses the question whether these laboratory findings can be generalized to the real world. In this study, participants were introduced to a waiting room scenario in which they interacted with a confederate. Eye movement analyses revealed that gaze behavior heavily depended on the social context and were influenced by whether an interaction is currently desired. We further did not find any evidence for altered gaze behavior in socially anxious participants. Alleged gaze avoidance or hypervigilance in social anxiety might thus represent a laboratory phenomenon that occurs only under very specific real-life conditions. Altogether the experiments described in the present thesis thus refine our understanding of social attention and simultaneously challenge the inferences we can draw from laboratory research.
... Although eye tracking allows us to study cognitive processes in preverbal infants in a non-invasive manner, it is questionable as to whether eye movements alone are most suited to reveal meaningful socio-communicative differences between clinical groups and subgroups. Several eye-tracking studies report differences in fixation patterns [Chawarska, Macari, & Shic, 2013;Guiraud et al., 2012;Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007]. However, these are not always reliably linked to ASD diagnosis [Young, Merin, Rogers, & Ozonoff, 2009]. ...
Studies with infant siblings of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder have attempted to identify early markers for the disorder and suggest that autistic symptoms emerge between 12 and 24 months of age. Yet, a reliable first‐year marker remains elusive. We propose that in order to establish first‐year manifestations of this inherently social disorder, we need to develop research methods that are sufficiently socially demanding and realistically interactive. Building on Keemink et al. [2019, Developmental Psychology, 55, 1362–1371], we employed a gaze‐contingent eye‐tracking paradigm in which infants could interact with face stimuli. Infants could elicit emotional expressions (happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger) from on‐screen faces by engaging in eye contact. We collected eye‐tracking data and video‐recorded behavioural response data from 122 (64 male, 58 female) typically developing infants and 31 infant siblings (17 male, 14 female) aged 6‐, 9‐ and 12‐months old. All infants demonstrated a significant Expression by AOI interaction (F(10, 1470) = 10.003, P < 0.001, ŋp² = 0.064). Infants' eye movements were “expression‐specific” with infants distributing their fixations to AOIs differently per expression. Whereas eye movements provide no evidence of deviancies, behavioural response data show significant aberrancies in reciprocity for infant siblings. Infant siblings show reduced social responsiveness at the group level (F(1, 147) = 4.10, P = 0.042, ŋp² = 0.028) and individual level (Fischer's Exact, P = 0.032). We conclude that the gaze‐contingency paradigm provides a realistically interactive experience capable of detecting deviancies in social responsiveness early, and we discuss our results in relation to subsequent infant sibling development.
Lay Summary
We investigated how infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder respond to interactive faces presented on a computer screen. Our study demonstrates that infant siblings are less responsive when interacting with faces on a computer screen (e.g., they smile and imitate less) in comparison to infants without an older sibling with autism. Reduced responsiveness within social interaction could potentially have implications for how parents and carers interact with these infants.
... requirement of responses by participants during the eyetracking session) into active and passive categories, 11 of the 95 reviewed studies were found to have used active stimuli, with the remaining 84 studies using passive stimuli. For example, Merin et al. (2007) presented infants with an adapted Still Face paradigm and coded the infants' behavioral responses immediately following the eye-tracking exposure, whereas, Hendry et al. (2018) expected participants to simply to observe stimuli, which automatically transitioned after 15 s unless sustained collection of eye-tracking data occurred longer than 5 s. Therefore, stimulus design and participant exchange were also contributing to heterogeneity of stimuli. ...
Eye-tracking represents a sensitive, direct measure of gaze allocation and goal-directed looking behaviors that correspond to visual information processing. Clear definitions and standardization of research protocols to document the utility and feasibility of these methods are warranted. This systematic review provides an account of stimuli dimensions and experimental paradigms used in eye-tracking research for young children at risk for ASD published from 2005 through 2019. This review identifies variability in eye-tracking protocols and heterogeneity of stimuli used for eye-tracking as factors that undermine the value of eye-tracking as an objective, reliable screening tool. We underscore the importance of sharing eye-tracking stimuli to enhance replicability of findings and more importantly the need to develop a bank of publicly available, validated stimuli.
... For example, when children with ASD are presented with human face stimuli in an eye-tracking paradigm, they show atypical gaze patterns such as reduced gaze directed at the eye region of faces and increased attention to nonsocial components of stimuli (reviewed by Black et al., 2017;Frazier et al., 2017;Papagiannopoulou, Chitty, Hermens, Hickie, & Lagopoulos, 2014). These patterns may be present early on, as 6-month-old infants considered at-risk for developing ASD (because an older sibling had an ASD diagnosis) had atypical fixations on faces (Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007), although eye-looking behavior may also be typical in the first few months of life and then decline over time in children eventually diagnosed with ASD (Jones & Klin, 2013). These results suggest that there may be differences in social cognitive or attentional mechanisms in people with ASD that can be measured in eye tracking and may compound over development into more pronounced or disabling social behavioral deficits that eventually become observable in social behavior assessments. ...
The nonhuman primate provides a sophisticated animal model system both to explore neurobiological mechanisms underlying complex behaviors and to facilitate preclinical research for neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disease. A better understanding of evolutionarily conserved behaviors and brain processes between humans and nonhuman primates will be needed to successfully apply recently released NIMH guidelines (NOT‐MH‐19‐053) for conducting rigorous nonhuman primate neurobehavioral research. Here, we explore the relationship between two measures of social behavior that can be used in both humans and nonhuman primates—traditional observations of social interactions with conspecifics and eye gaze detection in response to social stimuli. Infant male rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) serving as controls (N = 14) for an ongoing study were observed in their social rearing groups and participated in a noninvasive, longitudinal eye‐tracking study. We found significant positive relationships between time spent viewing eyes of faces in an eye tracker and number of initiations made for social interactions with peers that is consistent with similar observations in human populations. Although future studies are needed to determine if this relationship represents species‐typical social developmental processes, these preliminary results provide a novel framework to explore the relationship between social interactions and social attention in nonhuman primate models for neurobehavioral development.
... Haith and colleagues for instance report that between 3 and 11 weeks of age, participating infants looked ten times longer at the eyes than at the mouth even if the person was talking [50]. At 6-months of age, infants start looking longer at the mouth, though the eyes still form the major attraction of the face [60,90]. It is around this age that infants start babbling [30,99]. ...
When newly born into this world, there is an overwhelming multitude of things to learn, ranging from learning to speak to learning how to solve a mathematical equation. Amidst this abundance, action perception is developing already in the first months of life. Why would learning about others’ actions be among the first items to acquire? What is the relevance of action perception for young infants? Part of the answer probably lies in the strong dependence on others. Newborn human infants need caretakers even for fulfilling their basic needs. Weak neck muscles make it hard for them to lift up their head, and most of their movements come across as uncoordinated. Clearly, getting themselves a drink or dressing themselves is not part of their repertoire. Their reliance on their caregivers makes these caregivers and their actions important for the young infant. Seeing that the caregiver responds to their calls can already reduce some of the stress that comes with being so dependent. As such, it is helpful for an infant to learn to distinguish different actions of the caregiver. Not only are the caregivers’ actions focused on the infant’s physical needs, but also on helping the infant to regulate her emotions. Parents typically comfort a baby by softly rocking them, and by talking and smiling to them. Social interaction between caregiver and infant thus starts immediately after birth, and these interactions help them to bond. In the context of social interaction, it is useful to be able to distinguish a smile from a frown. Interpreting the facial actions of others is vital to successful communication. Moreover, in the period in which infants are still very limited in their own actions, observing others’ actions forms a main resource for learning about the world. Making sense of others’ actions is therefore of central importance already during early development.
... However, to our knowledge, no study has tested whether similar attentional biases are present within ASD populations. Infants at familial risk for ASD and individuals who meet diagnostic criteria are also found to spend less time looking at the eyes when viewing faces (Jones & Klin, 2013;Papagiannopoulou, Chitty, Hermens, Hickie, & Lagopoulos, 2014) and spend less time looking to the face when interacting with others in real-life settings (Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007;Noris, Nadel, Barker, Hadjikhani, & Billard, 2012), although recent work with larger samples report no differences in time spent looking at the eyes between toddlers with and without ASD (Kwon, Moore, Barnes, Cha, & Pierce, 2019). The manifestation of a "double hit" of ASD and CU traits is unknown; it may be the case that CU traits are not associated with atypical gaze if individuals with ASD are already spending less time looking towards the eye area. ...
Research suggests an increased prevalence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and a similar impairment in fear recognition to that reported in non-ASD populations. However, past work has used measures not specifically designed to measure CU traits and has not examined whether decreased attention to the eyes reported in non-ASD populations is also present in individuals with ASD. The current paper uses a measure specifically designed to measure CU traits to estimate prevalence in a large community-based ASD sample. Parents of 189 adolescents with ASD completed questionnaires assessing CU traits, and emotional and behavioral problems. A subset of participants completed a novel emotion recognition task ( n = 46). Accuracy, reaction time, total looking time, and number of fixations to the eyes and mouth were measured. Twenty-two percent of youth with ASD scored above a cut-off expected to identify the top 6% of CU scores. CU traits were associated with longer reaction times to identify fear and fewer fixations to the eyes relative to the mouth during the viewing of fearful faces. No associations were found with accuracy or total looking time. Results suggest the mechanisms that underpin CU traits may be similar between ASD and non-ASD populations.
... During development, responsiveness is best operationalized using psycho-physiological measures or visceral behavioral responses (29,30). Visceral behavioral responses indicating arousal include, but are not limited to, approaching or avoiding an unfamiliar toy or person (60)(61)(62)(63), reciprocating facial emotional expressions (64), joint attention (31,65,66), and a range of behaviors (such as negative reactivity, affect, vocalizations, gaze following, smiling, bids for attention, social reciprocity, etc.) that can be coded from an interaction between an infant and their mother/caregiver (64,(67)(68)(69)(70)(71)(72)(73). Psycho-physiological measures that may indicate responsiveness include electrodermal activity (70,(74)(75)(76), heart rate variability (70,76,77), respiratory sinus arrhythmia (70), vagal tone (67), and pupil dilation (78)(79)(80)(81). ...
Background
From birth, the human propensity to selectively attend and respond to critical super-stimuli forms the basis of future socio-emotional development and health. In particular, the first super-stimuli to preferentially engage and elicit responses in the healthy newborn are the physical touch, voice and face/eyes of caregivers. From this grows selective attention and responsiveness to emotional expression, scaffolding the development of empathy, social cognition, and other higher human capacities. In this paper, the protocol for a longitudinal, prospective birth-cohort study is presented. The major aim of this study is to map the emergence of individual differences and disturbances in the system of social-Responsiveness, Emotional Attention, and Learning (REAL) through the first 3 years of life to predict the specific emergence of the major childhood mental health problems, as well as social adjustment and impairment more generally. A further aim of this study is to examine how the REAL variables interact with the quality of environment/caregiver interactions.
Methods/Design
A prospective, longitudinal birth-cohort study will be conducted. Data will be collected from four assessments and mothers' electronic medical records.
Discussion
This study will be the first to test a clear developmental map of both the unique and specific causes of childhood psychopathology and will identify more precise early intervention targets for children with complex comorbid conditions.
... Les procédures d'utilisation du Eye Tracker ont même été implantées chez de jeunes enfants et même chez des bébés de trois mois(Turati, Di Giorgio, Bardi et Simion, 2010). Des chercheurs les utilisent pour mieux comprendre les enfants à risque de développement atypique(Farzin, Rivera et Whitney, 2010;Merin, Young, Ozonoff et Rogers, 2007). Les chercheurs qui travaillent avecle Eye Tracker s'accordent unanimement à dire qu'il recueille des données très précieuses et difficilement accessibles autrement. ...
Notre étude porte sur l’influence potentiellement exercée par des activités régulières d’appréciation d’oeuvres d’art sur le développement des seuils d’attention de 125 élèves du primaire. L’attention des enfants a été mesurée sur toute une année scolaire, avec groupe témoin, suite à des activités qui suivaient un protocole d’appréciation d’oeuvres déjà validé par des chercheurs, lequel est appelé Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). Nos résultats suggèrent une progression significative de l’attention des élèves soumis régulièrement au protocole VTS. Au contraire, chez le groupe témoin, nous avons constaté une légère diminution dans les habiletés attentionnelles.
Our study examines the potential influence of regular art appreciation activities on the development of attention thresholds of 125 elementary school students. The children’s attention was measured over an entire school year, with a control group, following activities that complied to a researcher-validated art appreciation protocol called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). Our results suggest a significant increase in the attention of students who were regularly subjected to the VTS protocol. In contrast, in the control group, we found a slight decrease in attentional skills.
... Few existing studies have included live interactions in addition to screen-based eye-tracking (Wass et al., 2015) and EEG tasks in infancy in typical development, and there is emerging evidence that the two experimental designs might lead to somewhat different results. Some work on ASD with infants and young children has used live video streams to more realistically replicate social interactions (Hutchins and Brien, 2016;Merin et al., 2007), though they did not compare this directly to screen-based measures. Work which directly compares these with screen-based measures would be of use in better understanding how existing work on early signs of neurodevelopmental conditions relates to more ecologically valid situations. ...
Neurodevelopmental disorders like autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affect 2–10% of children worldwide but are still poorly understood. Prospective studies of infants with an elevated familial likelihood of ASD or ADHD can provide insight into early mechanisms that canalize development down a typical or atypical course. Such work holds potential for earlier identification and intervention to support optimal outcomes in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. Disrupted attention may be involved in developmental trajectories to ASD and ADHD. Specifically, altered attention to social stimuli has been suggested as a possible endophenotype of ASD, lying between genetic factors impacting brain development and later symptoms. Similarly, changes in domain-general aspects of attention are commonly seen in ADHD and emerging evidence suggests these may begin in infancy. Could these patterns point to a common risk factor for both disorders? Or does social attention reflect the activity of a particular network of brain systems that is distinct to those underpinning general attention skills? One challenge to addressing such questions is our lack of understanding of the relation between social and general attention. In this chapter we review evidence from infants with later ASD and ADHD that illuminates this question.
... There were studies applied SFP in emotional regulatory of ASD and they found most of children with ASD employed more simple regulatory behavior and less complex strategies (17,18). Additional, Cassel et al. also found that there were difficulties for children with ASD to develop socioemotional ability (10,19). In this study, the SFP was used to measure social behavior of HR group and TD group. ...
Background: Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can currently be diagnosed at the age of 2 years, age at ASD diagnosis is still 40 months or even later. In order to early screening for ASD with more objective method, behavioral videos were used in a number of studies in recent years.
Method: The still-face paradigm (SFP) was adopted to measure the frequency and duration of non-social smiling, protest behavior, eye contact, social smiling, and active social engagement in high-risk ASD group (HR) and typical development group (TD) (HR: n = 45; TD: n = 43). The HR group was follow-up until they were 2 years old to confirm final diagnosis. Machine learning methods were used to establish models for early screening of ASD.
Results: During the face-to-face interaction (FF) episode of the SFP, there were statistically significant differences in the duration and frequency of eye contact, social smiling, and active social engagement between the two groups. During the still-face (SF) episode, there were statistically significant differences in the duration and frequency of eye contact and active social engagement between the two groups. The 45 children in the HR group were reclassified into two groups after follow-up: five children in the N-ASD group who were not meet the criterion of ASD and 40 children in the ASD group. The results showed that the accuracy of Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification was 83.35% for the SF episode.
Conclusion: The use of the social behavior indicator of the SFP for a child with HR before 2 years old can effectively predict the clinical diagnosis of the child at the age of 2 years. The screening model constructed using SVM based on the SF episode of the SFP was the best. This also proves that the SFP has certain value in high-risk autism spectrum disorder screening. In addition, because of its convenient, it can provide a self-screening mode for use at home.
Trial registration: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, ChiCTR-OPC-17011995.
... Future research should furthermore consider combining multiple non-verbal communication parameters and clinical data (e.g., questionnaires) in order to improve prediction and classification accuracy further and to possibly detect potential associations across domains. For instance, peculiarities in eye-gaze (Merin et al., 2007;Georgescu et al., 2013) and facial expression (McIntosh et al., 2006) in ASD demonstrate feasible approaches. ...
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a spectrum of neurodevelopmental conditions characterized by difficulties in social communication and social interaction as well as repetitive behaviors and restricted interests. Prevalence rates have been rising, and existing diagnostic methods are both extremely time and labor consuming. There is an urgent need for more economic and objective automatized diagnostic tools that are independent of language and experience of the diagnostician and that can help deal with the complexity of the autistic phenotype. Technological advancements in machine learning are offering a potential solution, and several studies have employed computational approaches to classify ASD based on phenomenological, behavioral or neuroimaging data. Despite of being at the core of ASD diagnosis and having the potential to be used as a behavioral marker for machine learning algorithms, only recently have movement parameters been used as features in machine learning classification approaches. In a proof-of-principle analysis of data from a social interaction study we trained a classification algorithm on intrapersonal synchrony as an automatically and objectively measured phenotypic feature from 29 autistic and 29 typically developed individuals to differentiate those individuals with ASD from those without ASD. Parameters included nonverbal motion energy values from 116 videos of social interactions. As opposed to previous studies to date, our classification approach has been applied to non-verbal behavior objectively captured during naturalistic and complex interactions with a real human interaction partner assuring high external validity. A machine learning approach lends itself particularly for capturing heterogeneous and complex behavior in real social interactions and will be essential in developing automatized and objective classification methods in ASD.
... Eye-mouth index (EMI) is a measure indicating relative preference for looking to the eyes or mouth (Merin, Young, Ozonoff & Rogers, 2007). EMI is therefore not contingent on overall looking to the face; likely to vary across stimuli. ...
Eye-tracking research on social attention in infants and toddlers has included heterogeneous stimuli and analysis techniques. This allows measurement of looking to inner facial features under diverse conditions but restricts across-study comparisons. Eye–mouth index (EMI) is a measure of relative preference for looking to the eyes or mouth, independent of time spent attending to the face. The current study assessed whether EMI was more robust to differences in stimulus type than percent dwell time (PDT) toward the eyes, mouth, and face. Participants were typically developing toddlers aged 18–30 months (N = 58). Stimuli were dynamic videos with single and multiple actors. It was hypothesized that stimulus type would affect PDT to the face, eyes, and mouth, but not EMI. Generalized estimating equations demonstrated that all measures including EMI were influenced by stimulus type. Nevertheless, planned contrasts suggested that EMI was more robust than PDT when comparing heterogeneous stimuli. EMI may allow for a more robust comparison of social attention to inner facial features across eye-tracking studies.
... To date, many studies with infant siblings of children with ASD have focused on early attention to faces, in general (e.g., Chawarska, Macari, & Shic, 2013;Jones & Klin, 2013;Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007;Wagner, Luyster, Moustapha, Tager-Flusberg, & Nelson, 2018), but few of these studies examined emotional face processing. One study by Cornew and colleagues (Cornew, Dobkins, Akshoomoff, McCleery, & Carver, 2012) examined 18-month-old high-risk infants in a social referencing paradigm. ...
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their first-degree relatives show differences from neurotypical individuals in emotional face processing. Prospective studies of infant siblings of children with ASD, a group at high risk for autism (HRA), allow researchers to examine the early emergence of these differences. This study used eye tracking to examine disengagement of attention from emotional faces (fearful, happy, neutral) at 6, 9, and 12 months in low-risk control infants (LRC) and HRA infants who received a subsequent clinical judgment of ASD (HRA+) or non-ASD (HRA-). Infants saw centrally presented faces followed by a peripheral distractor (with face remaining present). For each emotion, latency to shift to the distractor and percentage of trials with no shift were calculated. Results showed increased saccadic latency and a greater percentage of no-shift trials for fearful faces. No between-group differences were present for emotion; however, there was an interaction between age and group for disengagement latency, with HRA+ infants slower to shift at 12 months compared with the other 2 groups. Exploratory correlational analyses looking at shift biases to fearful faces alongside measures of social behavior at 12 and 18 months (from the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales) revealed that for HRA+ infants, 9- and 12-month fear biases were significantly related to 12- and 18-month social abilities, respectively. This work suggests that both low- and high-risk infants show biases to threat-relevant faces, and that for HRA+, differences in attention shifting emerge with age, and a stronger fear bias could potentially relate to less social difficulty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
... First, not all studies have reported that infants' attention to the mouth declines beginning at 12 months (Fort, Ayneto-Gimeno, Escrichs, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2017;Hillairet de Boisferon et al., 2018;Tenenbaum, Shah, Sobel, Malle, & Morgan, 2013), and these results do not support the idea that the onset of speech production leads to changes in facescanning patterns. Other studies have linked face-scanning behavior with autism risk status (Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007) and clinical outcomes (Pons, Sanz-Torrent, Ferinu, Birulés, & Andreu, 2018;Young et al., 2009), although the direction of the observed relationship has been inconsistent. These findings could suggest that aspects of socioemotional development may be a concurrent driver of changes in infants' face-scanning patterns. ...
A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of children's age (5 months to 5 years) and language background (monolingual English, monolingual French, bilingual English-French), and the speaker's language (dominant, nondominant, or nonnative) relative to children's native language(s). Data from 129 bilingual adults were also collected for comparison. Five-month-olds showed balanced attention to the eyes and mouth, but children up to 5 years tended to be most interested in the mouth. In contrast, adults were most interested in the eyes. We found little evidence for different patterns of attention for monolinguals versus bilinguals, or to a native versus a nonnative speaker. Using percentile scores, monolinguals with larger productive vocabularies looked more at the mouth, while bilinguals with larger comprehension vocabularies looked marginally less at the mouth, although both effects were small and not as robust with raw vocabulary scores. Children showed large but stable individual variability in their face scanning patterns across different speakers. Our results show that the way that children allocate their attention to talking faces continues to change from infancy through the preschool years and beyond. Future studies will need to go beyond looking at bilingualism, speaker language, and vocabulary size to understand what drives children's in-the-moment attention to talking faces. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
... Cette imitation verbale immédiate « constitue un élément important de l'acquisition du vocabulaire entre 1 et 2-3 ans » (Nadel, 2016, p.26). Ainsi les particularités du balayage visuel des visages humains détectées dès 3 à 6 mois d'âge peuvent partiellement expliquer les troubles de développement du langage des enfants autistes (Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007). A l'âge de 6 mois, la fixation du regard peut être parfaitement adéquate en présence d'une moindre fixation visuelle de la bouche qui se révèle être prédictive d'un trouble langagier au cours du développement ultérieur y compris pour les enfants ne présentant pas de TSA (Young, Merin, Rogers, & Ozonoff, 2009 (Veríssimo, Blicharski, Strayer, & Santos, 1995). ...
Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) involve a significantly different developmental prognosis depending on severity and associated disorders. Relationship difficulties, inadequate behaviours and the specific needs of the child have implications on family functioning and affect parents' experiences. This situation generates significant stress that can potentially undermine parental cohesion, affect parent-child interactions, impair parenting, and lead to lessened perceptions of the quality of family relationships. Considering the social ecology of the family environment allows us to question the relationship between the family climate perceived by mothers, evaluated by the IRF (LARIPE, 1989), and the perceived maternal stress, measured by the ISP/FB (Bigras, LaFrenière and Abidin, 1996), taking into account the singularity of disability, namely autistic disorder severity, determined by the EEAI (Rogé, 1989), and the coexistence of a language disorder and/or an associated intellectual impairment defined by medical diagnosis realized prior to study.Language competence has a high impact, both on the age of parental alert and age of diagnosis by professionals, and is strongly associated with the severity of autistic disorders evaluation (N=65). Depending on the level of perceived maternal stress, using a cluster analysis based on the dimensions of ISP/FB, the quality of family relationships differs significantly. The most stressed mothers perceive the family climate as more confrontational. By considering maternal experience at the eco-systemic level rather than dyadic, an ecological intervention by integrating a MIRA Foundation (Quebec) assistance dog into the family group (n=24) produced a concomitant decrease for maternal stress related to management of child's difficult behaviours and for severity of autistic disorders. In absence of differences in the first measurement time with mothers waiting for service (n=26), mothers in families with a dog are less stressed both overall, than for interactions and for education of the autistic child. They also perceive a more favourable relationship climate. Results obtained highlight the contribution of animal mediation to improving the quality of life of all members in the microsystem, particularly on intra and extra-familial interactions facilitation.
Keywords : Autism Spectrum Disorders - Family Functioning - Parental Stress - Social Ecology - Animal Mediation
(French manuscript)
... First, not all studies have reported that infants' attention to the mouth declines beginning at 12 months (Fort, Ayneto-Gimeno, Escrichs, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2017;Hillairet de Boisferon et al., 2018;Tenenbaum, Shah, Sobel, Malle, & Morgan, 2013), and these results do not support the idea that the onset of speech production leads to changes in facescanning patterns. Other studies have linked face-scanning behavior with autism risk status (Merin, Young, Ozonoff, & Rogers, 2007) and clinical outcomes (Pons, Sanz-Torrent, Ferinu, Birulés, & Andreu, 2018;Young et al., 2009), although the direction of the observed relationship has been inconsistent. These findings could suggest that aspects of socioemotional development may be a concurrent driver of changes in infants' face-scanning patterns. ...
A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking towards the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of children’s age (5 months to 5 years) and language background (monolingual English, monolingual French, bilingual English-French), and the speaker’s language (dominant, non-dominant, or non-native) relative to children’s native language(s). Data from 129 bilingual adults were also collected for comparison. Five-month-olds showed balanced attention to the eyes and mouth, but children up to 5 years tended to be most interested in the mouth. In contrast, adults were most interested in the eyes. We found little evidence for different patterns of attention for monolinguals versus bilinguals, or to a native versus a non-native speaker. Using percentile scores, monolinguals with larger productive vocabularies looked more at the mouth, while bilinguals with larger comprehension vocabularies looked marginally less at the mouth, although both effects were small and not as robust with raw vocabulary scores. Children showed large but stable individual variability in their face scanning patterns across different speakers. Our results show that the way that children allocate their attention to talking faces continues to change from infancy through the preschool years and beyond. Future studies will need to go beyond looking at bilingualism, speaker language, and vocabulary size to understand what drives children’s in-the-moment attention to talking faces.
... The EMI has been used in many previous studies of face scanning in ASD and ASD-sibs, and gives a composite measure of the relative distribution of gaze within the face (e.g. Falck-Ytter 2008; Young et al. 2009;Merin et al. 2007). ...
We studied visual attention to emotional faces in 10-month-old infant siblings of children with ASD (ASD-sibs; N = 70) and a siblings of typically developing children (N = 29) using static stimuli. Contrary to our predictions, we found no evidence for atypical gaze behavior in ASD-sibs when boys and girls were analyzed together. However, a sex difference was found in ASD-sibs' visual attention to the mouth. Male ASD-sibs looked more at the mouth across emotions compared to male controls and female ASD-sibs. In contrast, female ASD-sibs looked less at the mouth compared to female controls. These findings suggest that some aspects of early emerging atypical social attention in ASD-sibs may be sex specific.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (10.1007/s10803-018-3799-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
... In addition to low-risk, typically developing infants, still-face effects are evident in risk populations, such as infants who are preterm, at familial risk for autism spectrum disorder, or experienced prenatal substance exposure e.g. [20][21][22] . Infant behavior during the FFSF has been linked to later attachment quality and behavior problems 2 . ...
Abstract Infant looking patterns during interaction offer an early window into social and nonsocial engagement. Recent evidence indicates that infant looks exhibit temporal dependency—one look duration predicts the next look duration. It is unknown, however, whether temporal dependency emerges as infants structure their own looking or whether it is influenced by interaction. We examined whether a perturbation of social interaction affected temporal dependency. Using the Face-to-Face/Still-Face procedure, we compared temporal dependency during parental interaction (the Face-to-Face & Reunion episodes) to parental non-responsiveness (the Still-Face episode). Overall, the durations of successive infant looks were predictable; past behavior constrained current behavior. The duration of one look at the parent (Face Look) predicted the duration of the next Face Look. Likewise, the duration of a look at any place that was not the parent’s face (Away Look) predicted the duration of the next Away Look. The temporal dependency of Face Looks (social engagement) was unaffected by the Still-Face perturbation, but the temporal dependency of Away Looks (nonsocial engagement) declined during the Still-Face. Infant temporal structuring of engagement during social looking is not dependent on parental interaction while the disruption of interaction affects infants’ structuring of their own non-social engagement.
... In some cases, the term 'fixation' is used both in world-centred and head-centred frames of reference, even in the same research field, without explicitly distinguishing between the two. In infant looking behaviour, for example, Merin et al. [27] report on fixations recorded with a remote eye tracker, whereas Franchak et al. [28] report on fixations recorded with a mobile eye tracker. This is problematic for two reasons. ...
Eye movements have been extensively studied in a wide range of research fields. While new methods such as mobile eye tracking and eye tracking in virtual/augmented realities are emerging quickly, the eye-movement terminology has scarcely been revised. We assert that this may cause confusion about two of the main concepts: fixations and saccades. In this study, we assessed the definitions of fixations and saccades held in the eye-movement field, by surveying 124 eye-movement researchers. These eye-movement researchers held a variety of definitions of fixations and saccades, of which the breadth seems even wider than what is reported in the literature. Moreover, these definitions did not seem to be related to researcher background or experience. We urge researchers to make their definitions more explicit by specifying all the relevant components of the eye movement under investigation: (i) the oculomotor component: e.g. whether the eye moves slow or fast; (ii) the functional component: what purposes does the eye movement (or lack thereof) serve; (iii) the coordinate system used: relative to what does the eye move; (iv) the computational definition: how is the event represented in the eye-tracker signal. This should enable eye-movement researchers from different fields to have a discussion without misunderstandings.
The purpose of this study is firstly to examine the mental health status among parents of children with developmental disorders in relation to certain family and demographic factors and, secondly, to determine the predictor role of parental self-efficacy in relation to mental health of parents of children with developmental disorders. Forty-six people participated in the study, ages 23-49, M = 37.46, SD = 6.51, parents of children with ASD or other developmental disorders, children ages ranges between 3 and 15, M = 6.50, SD = 2.77. The questionnaires used were DASS21R for anxiety and depression, and Parenting Sense of Competence Scale was used for parenting self-efficacy. Results showed that mothers of children with developmental disorders have higher levels of anxiety than their fathers, that age is a positive predictor of depression and anxiety in parents of children with developmental disorders, and that self-efficacy is a negative predictor of mental health disorders.
Developmental risk refers to conditions, characteristics, experiences, or situations with potentially deleterious effects that lead to outcomes later in life that do not meet societal expectations. While risk is typically framed as the statistical probability of a problematic outcome in relation to the general population, the converse notion of well-being is considered in relation to the level of functioning at a given developmental stage. The contributors to this volume provide insight into developmental well-being by examining the ways that culture and context affect outcomes associated with various types of risk, such as those related to oppression, academic performance, family background, life history, physical health, and psychiatric conditions. Even though certain outcomes may seem inevitable in cases involving harmful environments, diseases, and disorders, they are virtually all influenced by complex interactions among individuals, their families, communities, and societies.
Reduced eye contact early in life may play a role in the developmental pathways that culminate in a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. However, there are contradictory theories regarding the neural mechanisms involved. According to the amygdala theory of autism, reduced eye contact results from a hypoactive amygdala that fails to flag eyes as salient. However, the eye avoidance hypothesis proposes the opposite—that amygdala hyperactivity causes eye avoidance. This review evaluated studies that measured the relationship between eye gaze and activity in the ‘social brain’ when viewing facial stimuli. Of the reviewed studies, eight of eleven supported the eye avoidance hypothesis. These results suggest eye avoidance may be used to reduce amygdala-related hyperarousal among people on the autism spectrum.
Is it possible to detect autism during the first year of life.
The knowledge on early symptoms observed in autistic children has improved during the last decade. This is due particularly to studies of home videos and more recently to prospective studies on high-risk infants (siblings of children already diagnosed autistic). These researches have shown that the symptoms which characterize the autistic disorder first appear mainly during the second year of life. However, at least in some cases, subtle abnormalities have been reported since the first year. This paper reviews the data from these researches: they show that, as early as 12 months, some items (the rarity or defect of social smile, eye to eye contact and orientation to name) can predict a later diagnosis of autism or Autism Spectrum Disorder.
What are infant siblings teaching us about autism in infancy?
The purpose of this review is to synthesize the main findings thus far, particularly highlighting unexpected findings and areas of discrepancy in order to suggest targets for development of new hypotheses and new research. We will focus on five topics: presence of ASD in the infant sibling groups, patterns and characteristics of motor development, patterns and characteristics of social and emotional development, patterns and characteristics of intentional communication-both verbal and nonverbal, and patterns that mark the onset of behaviors pathognomonic for ASD. We will end with a discussion of surprises, contradictions and discrepancies, implications, and research needs.
Despite an increasing interest in detecting early signs of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), the pathogenesis of the social impairments characterizing ASD is still largely unknown. Atypical visual attention to social stimuli is a potential early marker of the social and communicative deficits of ASD. Some authors hypothesized that such impairments are present from birth, leading to a decline in the subsequent typical functioning of the learning-mechanisms. Others suggested that these early deficits emerge during the transition from subcortically to cortically mediated mechanisms, happening around 2–3 months of age. The present study aimed to provide additional evidence on the origin of the early visual attention disturbance that seems to characterize infants at high risk (HR) for ASD. Four visual preference tasks were used to investigate social attention in 4-month-old HR, compared to low-risk (LR) infants of the same age. Visual attention differences between HR and LR infants emerged only for stimuli depicting a direct eye-gaze, compared to an adverted eye-gaze. Specifically, HR infants showed a significant visual preference for the direct eye-gaze stimulus compared to LR infants, which may indicate a delayed development of the visual preferences normally observed at birth in typically developing infants. No other differences were found between groups. Results are discussed in the light of the hypotheses on the origins of early social visual attention impairments in infants at risk for ASD.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are well-known early onset, neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by qualitative impairments in social communication and interaction, and by restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped behaviors, interests and activities. An increasing interest in timely detection of ASD red flags has emerged, mostly driven by the insight that early identification is a fundamental prerequisite for early intervention (Rogers et al., 2014; Venkataraman et al., 2016). Nevertheless, the pathogenesis of the social impairments that characterizes ASD is still largely unknown.Reduced early orienting and attention to social stimuli, such as faces or eye-gaze, but also biological motion, have been hypothesized to play a crucial role in the development of social impairments found in ASD (Hedger et al., 2020). These early signs are thought to have cascading effects on the typical development of the social brain network (Johnson, 2015), restricting the infants’ exposure to typical social interaction and, consequently, interfering with the emergence of critical developmental milestones relevant for adequate social cognition and communication capabilities. Within this theoretical framework, the present study sought to provide additional evidence on the origin of the early visual attention disturbance that seems to characterize at-high risk infants for ASD (e.g., siblings of children with ASD) within the first 4-5 months of life.
Introduction
Few studies have used eye tracking as a screening tool for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in preterm infants.
Objectives
To evaluate fixation time on social and non-social figures and percentage of preterm babies who gazed at the images.
Methods
This was a cross-sectional study of 31 preterm infants born weighing ≤ 2,000 g in which eye gaze was evaluated at 6 months of corrected age. Six boards with social and non-social figures were projected on a computer screen, successively, evaluating time and percentage of preterm babies who gazed at each board. The Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT) was answered at 18 months of corrected age.
Results
Preterm infants showed longer visual fixation time on social figures compared with non-social images, regardless of the position of the social figure on the board. Similar percentages of preterm infants gazed either at social or non-social figures, at social figures with a direct or an indirect look, and at the eyes or mouth of the social figures. No preterm infant screened positive on the M-CHAT.
Conclusion
At 6 months of corrected age, preterm infants show the ability to gaze in an eye-tracking test, with preference for social figures, suggesting that this tool could be useful as another screening instrument for ASD.
Working memory performance in individuals with autism is a matter of debate in the literature. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of stimuli in the working memory of children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Sixteen children with ASD, clinically diagnosed as high functioning, were matched for gender and age and were compared with 16 typically developing controls. A face perception test and delayed matching task with partially masked faces are used for assessment. The results showed that the performance of both face perception and memorizing tasks is significantly lower in autism during mouth masking when compared to eye masking or without masking faces. We concluded that the performance of working memory in autism depends on the nature of stimuli to be remembered.
This thesis explores engagement between autistic children and donkeys during Equid Assisted Activity (EAA) sessions. I present the blurred position of EAA in Human-Animal Research that results in unreliable methodology and understanding about the equids’ perceived abilities. I argue that ‘benefits of EAA’ explored in other research is a problematic concept, because of the heterogeneous nature of autism and the individual character differences between donkeys. Using narrative analysis and narrative ethology showed that autistic children and their donkey partners demonstrate diverse and complex engagement behaviours that cannot be reduced to an entity of benefits that applies to all individuals. Qualitative stories about autistic children and donkey interactions offered a broader understanding of who each participant was, resulting in their caretakers forming new accountabilities and making informed decisions about their participants’ wellbeing.
I questioned the quality of engagement in 15 reported studies on EAA and the methodological preference of only measuring and reporting human responses. In order to measure the quality of engagement between autistic children and donkeys I designed and tested a Quality of Engagement Tool (QET) that was reliable enough to be used in a number of research designs.
The QET identified that engagement behaviour of one partner was correlated with that of the other partner in the same session. Individuals (children or donkeys) engaged differently when interacting with a conspecific as opposed to a heterospecific. The stories presented through narrative analysis and narrative ethology, coupled with the findings from the QET are important for future research. Measuring outcomes for children would be highly dependent on their relationship with their equid partner or indeed if they had the same partner for the duration of the research therefore; equids and humans should be considered as equal participants. The thesis concludes with a summary of findings from this project and signposts future research directions.
Face scanning is an important skill that takes place in a highly interactive context embedded within social interaction. However, previous research has studied face scanning using noninteractive stimuli. We aimed to study face scanning and social interaction in infancy in a more ecologically valid way by providing infants with a naturalistic and socially engaging experience. We developed a novel gazecontingent eye-tracking paradigm in which infants could interact with face stimuli. Responses (socially engaging/socially disengaging) from faces were contingent on infants' eye movements. We collected eye-tracking and behavioral data of 162 (79 male, 83 female) 6-, 9- and 12-month-old infants. All infants showed a clear preference for looking at the eyes relative to the mouth. Contingency was learned implicitly, and infants were more likely to show behavioral responses (e.g., smiling, pointing) when receiving socially engaging responses. Infants' responses were also more often congruent with the actors' responses. Additionally, our large sample allowed us to look at the ranges of behavior on our task, and we identified a small number of infants who displayed deviant behaviors. We discuss these findings in relation to data collected from a small sample (N = 11) of infants considered to be at-risk for autism spectrum disorders. Our results demonstrate the versatility of the gaze-contingency eye-tracking paradigm, allowing for a more nuanced and complex investigation of face scanning as it happens in real-life interaction. As we provide additional measures of contingency learning and reciprocity, our task holds the potential to investigate atypical neurodevelopment within the first year of life.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with deficits in the processing of social information and difficulties in social interaction, and individuals with ASD exhibit atypical attention and gaze. Traditionally, gaze studies have relied upon precise and constrained means of monitoring attention using expensive equipment in laboratories. We develop a low-cost off-the-shelf alternative for measuring attention that can be used in natural settings. The head and iris positions of 104 16-31 months children, 22 of them diagnosed with ASD, were recorded using the front facing camera in an iPad while they watched on the device screen a movie displaying dynamic stimuli, social on the left and nonsocial on the right. The head and iris position were then automatically analyzed via computer vision algorithms to detect the direction of attention. Children in the ASD group paid less attention to the movie, showed less attention to the social as compared to the nonsocial stimulus, and often fixated their attention to one side of the screen. The proposed method provides a low-cost means of monitoring attention to properly designed stimuli, demonstrating that the integration of stimuli design and automatic response analysis results in the opportunity to use off-the-shelf cameras to assess behavioral biomarkers.
Observed 37 mother–infant dyads in the laboratory when infants were 3 and 6 mo old to investigate developmental changes in infant responses to the mother's still face (SF). Infants reduced their smiling and increased their gazing away from mother during the SF at both 3 and 6 mo. Compared with 3-mo-olds, 6-mo-olds were more likely to use directed hand activities while gazing away from mother. Results suggest that developmental changes in gaze and motor activity are incorporated into the infant's response to a stressful situation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Previous experimenters have found that 4-day-old neonates look longer at their mother's face than at a stranger's face. We have replicated this finding under conditions where the infants are only provided with visual information on identity, with all the usual stimuli associated with the presence of the mother's face absent. The structure responsible for this cannot be equated with Conspec, the innate structure underlying face preference in neonates (Johnson & Morton, 1991). In a second experiment, we show that infants do not discriminate mother from stranger when both women are wearing head scarves. This indicates that, unlike older infants (de Schonen, Gil de Diaz, & Mathivet, 1986; de Schonen & Mathivet, 1990), neonates acquire a representation of their mother's face in which the hair line and outer contour have an integral part. This suggests that the system responsible for the neonates' performance is not the same as the one at work in older infants.
Goren, Sarty, and Wu (1975) claimed that newborn infants will follow a slowly moving schematic face stimulus with their head and eyes further than they will follow scrambled faces or blank stimuli. Despite the far-reaching theoretical importance of this finding, it has remained controversial and been largely ignored. In Experiment 1 we replicate the basic findings of the study. In Experiment 2 we attempt a second replication in a different maternity hospital, and extend the original findings with evidence suggesting that both the particular configuration of features, and some aspects of the features themselves, are important for preferential tracking in the first hour of life. In Experiment 3 we use a different technique to trace the preferential tracking of faces over the first five months of life. The preferential tracking of faces declines during the second month. The possible causes and consequences of this observation are discussed.
Good interview and diagnostic measures for autism and other pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs) are available but there is a lack of a good screening questionnaire.
To develop and test a screening questionnaire based on items in the best available diagnostic interview--the Autism Diagnostic Interview--Revised (ADI-R).
A 40-item scale, the Autism Screening Questionnaire (ASQ), was developed and tested on a sample of 160 individuals with PDD and 40 with non-PDD diagnoses.
The ASQ has good discriminative validity with respect to the separation of PDD from non-PDD diagnoses at all IQ levels, with a cut-off of 15 proving most effective. The differentiation between autism and other varieties of PDD was weaker.
The ASQ is an effective screening questionnaire for PDD.
The visual scanpaths of five high-functioning adult autistic males and five adult male controls were recorded using an infrared corneal reflection technique as they viewed photographs of human faces. Analyses of the scanpath data revealed marked differences in the scanpaths of the two groups. The autistic participants viewed nonfeature areas of the faces significantly more often and core feature areas of the faces (i.e., eyes, nose, and mouth) significantly less often than did control participants. Across both groups of participants, scanpaths generally did not differ as a function of the instructions given to the participants (i.e., "Please look at the faces in any manner you wish." vs. "Please identify the emotions portrayed in these faces."). Autistic participants showed a deficit in emotion recognition, but this effect was driven primarily by deficits in the recognition of fear. Collectively, these results indicate disorganized processing of face stimuli in autistic individuals and suggest a mechanism that may subserve the social information processing deficits that characterize autism spectrum disorders.
A region in the lateral aspect of the fusiform gyrus (FG) is more engaged by human faces than any other category of image. It has come to be known as the 'fusiform face area' (FFA). The origin and extent of this specialization is currently a topic of great interest and debate. This is of special relevance to autism, because recent studies have shown that the FFA is hypoactive to faces in this disorder. In two linked functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of healthy young adults, we show here that the FFA is engaged by a social attribution task (SAT) involving perception of human-like interactions among three simple geometric shapes. The amygdala, temporal pole, medial prefrontal cortex, inferolateral frontal cortex and superior temporal sulci were also significantly engaged. Activation of the FFA to a task without faces challenges the received view that the FFA is restricted in its activities to the perception of faces. We speculate that abstract semantic information associated with faces is encoded in the FG region and retrieved for social computations. From this perspective, the literature on hypoactivation of the FFA in autism may be interpreted as a reflection of a core social cognitive mechanism underlying the disorder.
Diminished gaze fixation is one of the core features of autism and has been proposed to be associated with abnormalities in the neural circuitry of affect. We tested this hypothesis in two separate studies using eye tracking while measuring functional brain activity during facial discrimination tasks in individuals with autism and in typically developing individuals. Activation in the fusiform gyrus and amygdala was strongly and positively correlated with the time spent fixating the eyes in the autistic group in both studies, suggesting that diminished gaze fixation may account for the fusiform hypoactivation to faces commonly reported in autism. In addition, variation in eye fixation within autistic individuals was strongly and positively associated with amygdala activation across both studies, suggesting a heightened emotional response associated with gaze fixation in autism.
This article reviews behavioral and electrophysiological studies of face processing and discusses hypotheses for understanding the nature of face processing impairments in autism. Based on results of behavioral studies, this study demonstrates that individuals with autism have impaired face discrimination and recognition and use atypical strategies for processing faces characterized by reduced attention to the eyes and piecemeal rather than configural strategies. Based on results of electrophysiological studies, this article concludes that face processing impairments are present early in autism, by 3 years of age. Such studies have detected abnormalities in both early (N170 reflecting structural encoding) and late (NC reflecting recognition memory) stages of face processing. Event-related potential studies of young children and adults with autism have found slower speed of processing of faces, a failure to show the expected speed advantage of processing faces versus nonface stimuli, and atypical scalp topography suggesting abnormal cortical specialization for face processing. Other electrophysiological studies have suggested that autism is associated with early and late stage processing impairments of facial expressions of emotion (fear) and decreased perceptual binding as reflected in reduced gamma during face processing. This article describes two types of hypotheses-cognitive/perceptual and motivational/affective--that offer frameworks for understanding the nature of face processing impairments in autism. This article discusses implications for intervention.
Neuroimaging and behavioral studies have shown that children and adults with autism have impaired face recognition. Individuals with autism also exhibit atypical event-related brain potentials to faces, characterized by a failure to show a negative component (N170) latency advantage to face compared to nonface stimuli and a bilateral, rather than right lateralized, pattern of N170 distribution. In this report, performance by 143 parents of children with autism on standardized verbal, visual-spatial, and face recognition tasks was examined. It was found that parents of children with autism exhibited a significant decrement in face recognition ability relative to their verbal and visual spatial abilities. Event-related brain potentials to face and nonface stimuli were examined in 21 parents of children with autism and 21 control adults. Parents of children with autism showed an atypical event-related potential response to faces, which mirrored the pattern shown by children and adults with autism. These results raise the possibility that face processing might be a functional trait marker of genetic susceptibility to autism. Discussion focuses on hypotheses regarding the neurodevelopmental and genetic basis of altered face processing in autism. A general model of the normal emergence of social brain circuitry in the first year of life is proposed, followed by a discussion of how the trajectory of normal development of social brain circuitry, including cortical specialization for face processing, is altered in individuals with autism. The hypothesis that genetic-mediated dysfunction of the dopamine reward system, especially its functioning in social contexts, might account for altered face processing in individuals with autism and their relatives is discussed.
To examine mirror neuron abnormalities in autism, high-functioning children with autism and matched controls underwent fMRI while imitating and observing emotional expressions. Although both groups performed the tasks equally well, children with autism showed no mirror neuron activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis). Notably, activity in this area was inversely related to symptom severity in the social domain, suggesting that a dysfunctional 'mirror neuron system' may underlie the social deficits observed in autism.
Hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (HACA) may yield different solutions under permutations of the input order of the data. This instability is caused by ties, either in the initial proximity matrix or arising during agglomeration. The authors recommend to repeat the analysis on a large number of random permutations of the rows and columns of the proximity matrix and select a solution with the highest goodness-of-fit. This approach was implemented in an SPSS add-in, PermuCLUSTER, which can perform all HACA methods of SPSS. Analyses of 2 data sets show that (a) results are affected by input order, (b) instability in one method co-occurs with instability in other methods, and (c) some instability effects are more dramatic because they occur at higher agglomeration levels.
In the present study, we used a probe-detection task to compare attentional allocation to the eyes versus mouth regions of the face in high-functioning boys with autism relative to normal control boys matched for chronological age and IQs. We found that with upright faces, children from both groups attended more to the eyes region than to the mouth region, and to the same extent. This pattern of behavior was observed for not only initial orientation of attention, but also when enough time was provided for attention to be disengaged from its initial locus. The present findings suggest that atypical face processing in autism does not result from abnormal attentional allocation to the different face parts.
Within the last 10 years, there has been an upsurge of interest in face processing abilities in autism which has generated a proliferation of new empirical demonstrations employing a variety of measuring techniques. Observably atypical social behaviors early in the development of children with autism have led to the contention that autism is a condition where the processing of social information, particularly faces, is impaired. While several empirical sources of evidence lend support to this hypothesis, others suggest that there are conditions under which autistic individuals do not differ from typically developing persons. The present paper reviews this bulk of empirical evidence, and concludes that the versatility and abilities of face processing in persons with autism have been underestimated.
Both behavioral and neuroimaging evidence indicate that individuals with autism demonstrate marked abnormalities in the processing of faces. These abnormalities are often explained as either the result of an innate impairment to specialized neural systems or as a secondary consequence of reduced levels of social interest. A review of the developmental literature on typical and atypical face processing supports a synthesis of these two hypotheses by demonstrating that face processing is an emergent and developmental skill that is heavily mediated by early experience with faces. Individuals with autism may possess central nervous system irregularities that fail to attribute special status to faces, thereby limiting the visual input required for the development of neural regions specialized for face processing.
Previous work based on observations of home videotapes indicates that differences can be detected between infants with autism spectrum disorder and infants with typical development at I year of age, The present study addresses the question of whether autism can be distinguished from mental retardation by I year of age. Home videotapes of first birthday parties from 20 infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, 14 infants later diagnosed with mental retardation (without autism), and 20 typically developing infants were coded by blind raters with respect to the frequencies of specific social and communicative behaviors and repetitive motor actions. Results indicated that 1-year-olds with autism spectrum disorder can be distinguished from 1-year-olds with typical development and those with mental retardation. The infants with autism spectrum disorder looked at others and oriented to their names less frequently than infants with mental retardation. The infants with autism spectrum disorder and those with mental retardation used gestures and looked to objects held by others less frequently and engaged in repetitive motor actions more frequently than typically developing infants, These results indicate that autism can be distinguished from mental retardation and typical development by I year of age.
The timing of seed germination is thought to play an important role for species abundance and community composition in alpine habitats. Seed dormancy and germination responses to temperature and light of two widespread alpine sedges were investigated in order to gain insight into mechanisms regulating germination in the field. Seeds of Carex ferruginea germinated at high temperatures when freshly matured and were thus conditionally dormant. Germination percentages increased markedly due to dry storage and cold stratification, accompanied by a decrease of the minimum temperature for germination. Freshly-matured seeds of C. frigida required cold stratification to release strict dormancy, but germination was restricted to high temperatures (> 15°C). The existence of a carry-over mechanism, preventing the major fraction of current-year seeds to germinate even under optimum conditions in the next growing season was shown for this species. Seeds of both species showed very little germination in darkness and attained a germination peak in light after three month of stratification. The period of cold-stratification required to break dormancy was not related to winter duration as has been found in several species from high altitudes in America. Seeds buried outdoors underwent seasonal changes in dormancy, a trait which was hitherto not known in alpine plant species. Primary seed dormancy, a requirement for relatively high germination temperatures in stratified seeds and the induction of secondary dormancy in early summer by increasing temperatures restrict the 'germination window' to a short period after snowmelt in both species. Such a cautious type of seed regeneration may increase the chance of a seedling becoming established at the expense of the number of germinating seeds. This strategy is based on a light requirement for germination, enabling both species to built-up a large seed reservoir in the soil.
The arrival of a book for review usually gives rise to pleasant anticipation, and whatever criticisms have to be made, it is that almost always possible to find some pleasant things to say. But finding praise for this tome is a problem — it is a volume too far. It is to be hoped that the authors
This report describes a case study of the development of an infant with autism who was observed closely by professionals from birth and to whom a comprehensive psychological evaluation was administered at approximately 1 and 2 years of age. During the first 6 months of life, this infant displayed difficulties in oral motor coordination and muscle tone that fluctuated between hypotonia and hypertonia. He startled easily, had poor state regulation, and was hypersensitive to touch. Notably, however, during the first 6 months, this infant vocalized and responded socially to others by smiling and cooing. During the second half of the first year, he continued to demonstrate diffuse sensorimotor difficulties and diminished oral motor control. Hypersensitivity now extended to a wider range of stimuli. He had problems in sleep regulation. Motor stereotypies, including rocking, head banging, and toe walking, were observed. Difficulties in the domain of social interaction began to emerge during the second 6 months, including poor eye contact, failure to engage in imitative games, and lack of imitative vocal responses. By a little over 1 year of age, this infant met diagnostic criteria for autism based on the Autism Diagnostic Interview. There were several domains in which this toddler with autism did not show impairments. In the areas of immediate memory for actions, working memory, response inhibition, and speech perception, this 1-year old with autism displayed no evidence of significant impairment on the tests administered. This case study offers clues regarding the nature of autism at its earliest stages. Understanding early development in autism will be important for developing early screening and diagnostic tools.
Abstract— Children with diagnoses of either autism or Asperger's syndrome were matched on measures of verbal mental age with nonautistic control children. They were tested on their abilities to process both facial and nonfacial stimuli. There were no significant differences between the low ability autistic and control groups, but the high ability autistic and Asperger's children performed significantly worse than controls across all tests. Group averages masked substantial individual variation. The results are seen as indicating a general perceptual deficit that is not specific to faces or emotions. This appears to be a common correlate of autism and Asperger's syndrome, rather than a core symptom.
The characteristics of scanning patterns between the ages of 6 and 26 weeks were in-vestigated through repeated assessments of 10 infants. Eye movements were re-corded using a corneal-reflection system while the infants looked at 2 dynamic stim-uli: the naturally moving face of their mother and an abstract stimulus. Results indicated that the way infants scanned these stimuli stabilized only after 18 weeks, which is slightly later than the ages reported in the literature on infants' scanning of static stimuli. This effect was especially prominent for the abstract stimulus. From the 14-week session on, infants adapted their scanning behavior to the stimulus char-acteristics. When scanning the video of their mother's face, infants directed their gaze at the mouth and eye region most often. Even at the youngest age, there was no indication of an edge effect. When infants are born, their motor skills are very limited, and the fact that they have very little control over their limbs restricts the way in which they are able to explore the world around them. The oculomotor system—unlike other motor sys-tems—approximates its mature state several months after birth. The infant exer-cises this system every day from birth on. This makes vision one of the most im-portant channels through which babies learn about the world surrounding them. However, during the first months of life, eye movements and visual acuity are also subject to certain constraints. For example, during the first month, eye movements INFANCY, 6(2), 231–255 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
This study examined the association between infant still-face response and assessments of maternal behavior taken outside the still-face procedure (SFP). We also addressed the contributions of risk status and infant difficultness. Forty-one adolescent mother–infant dyads (high risk), and thirty-five adult mother–infant dyads (low risk) were seen when infants were 6 months old. Home visits were carried out to obtain maternal ratings of infant difficultness and to conduct observations of maternal interactive behavior. The SFP was conducted at the university two weeks later. Infant still-face response was coded for positive affect, negative affect and self-soothing behavior. Regression analyses revealed that maternal behavior was associated with negative affect and self-soothing behavior. In both cases risk status significantly moderated these effects. Infant difficultness significantly moderated the association between maternal behavior and self-soothing behavior, and marginally moderated the link between maternal behavior and negative affect.
The normal feedback infants receive from their mothers in face-to-face interaction was distorted by having the mothers face their infants but remain facially unresponsive. The infants studied reacted with intense wariness and eventual withdrawal, demonstrating the importance of interactional reciprocity and the ability of infants to regulate their emotional displays.
Two age groups of normal, autistic and subnormal children were tested for their ability to recognize the faces of peers from isolated facial features and inverted photographs. The normal and subnormal subjects found the upper regions of the face most helpful for identification, whereas the younger autistic children found the lower features more helpful. The older autistic children showed no specific reliance on any one area, but were found to have error scores as low as those of the younger autistic children on the recognition of lower parts and error scores as low as the; controls on recognizing upper portions. The results are discussed and are found to favour a hypothesis in which the autistic child's familiarity with the mouth and/or eye areas is related to a cognitive deficit which affects the processing of both verbal and non-verbal interpersonal communication.
Visual fixations of 3- to 5-week-old, 7-week-old, and 9- to 11-week-old infants were recorded as they scanned an adult's face which was stationary, moving, or talking. A dramatic increase in face fixations occurred between 5 and 7 weeks for all conditions. Talking produced an intensification of scanning in the eye area in the two older groups.
6 1-month-old infants and 6 2-month-old infants each viewed 3 faces (his mother's, a strange woman's, and a strange man's) while his eye movements were recorded by corneal photography. The 1-month-olds fixated away from the faces most of the time, and they looked at their mothers even less often than at the strangers. When they did fixate a face, they usually chose a limited portion of the perimeter. By constrast, 2-month-olds fixated the faces most of the time, looked at more features, and were more likely to look at internal features, especially the eyes. This scanning resembles that reported previously for 2-dimensional shapes, although in some respects it appears unique to faces.
The authors recently reported, in this journal, an epidemiologic survey of autism in Utah. Twenty (9.7%) of the 207 families ascertained had more than one autistic child. Analyses of these data revealed that autism is 215 times more frequent among the siblings of autistic patients than in the general population. The overall recurrence risk estimate (the chance that each sibling born after an autistic child will develop autism) is 8.6%. If the first autistic child is a male the recurrence risk estimate is 7%, and if a female 14.5%. These new recurrence risk estimates should be made available to all individuals who have autistic children and are interested in family planning.
Disturbances in gaze and patterns of facial interaction are prominent aspects of social dysfunction in autism; the nature of this disturbance has up to the present been unclear. This study examined the ability of autistic subjects to use the human face as a source of information. Autistic and age- and MA-matched retarded control subjects assembled a series of puzzles displaying photographs of human faces; puzzles differed in complexity, familiarity of the faces and configuration (normal vs scrambled faces). Significant effects of all three factors, but not of diagnostic group, were observed. The autistic subjects did not exhibit specific deficits in perception of faces.
3 studies were designed to examine the "still-face" paradigm, in which mothers stared at their 3- or 6-month-olds for a brief, still-face period interposed between 2 periods of normal face-to-face interaction. 6-month-olds decreased smiling and gazing at their mothers and grimaced more during the still-face period relative to the other periods; no period effects occurred in a no-change control group (Studies 1 and 2). Similar results were obtained when mothers and their infants observed and interacted with each other over closed-circuit color television monitors (Study 3). Moreover, the same relative decline in the infants' visual attention and positive affect during the still-face period occurred to a change in mothers' facial display (a televised, prerecorded, still face vs. a televised, live, interacting face) regardless of the presence or absence of their interactive voices (sound on the infants' monitor turned on or off). 3-month-olds exhibited a significant still-face effect, but only when maternal touch was a part of the manipulation (Study 1 vs. 2); therefore, the televised procedure was not conducted. The still-face effect is a robust phenomenon, produced with either "live" or "televised" procedures, both of which offer promising techniques for examining models of socioemotional perception/understanding of infants.
Groups of verbal MA-matched autistic and non-autistic retarded adolescents and young adults were tested for their ability to recognize emotion and personal identity in photographed faces and parts of faces. The tasks were to match expressions of emotion across different individuals, and to identify unfamiliar individuals despite changes in emotional expression. Faces were also presented upside-down. The results indicated a specific abnormality in the way autistic individuals perceive emotion, and possibly sex, in people's faces. In addition, however, autistic subjects' superior ability in matching upside-down faces suggested a more far-reaching abnormality in their perception of faces.
The techniques of visual preference and of habituation were used to test the ability of 1- and 2-month-olds to discriminate various arrangements of the features of the human face. We showed infants schematic drawings of a human face with the features (1) arranged naturally, (2) arranged symmetrically but scrambled, and (3) arranged asymmetrically and scrambled. 2-month-olds discriminated among all 3 arrangements; 1-month-olds appeared not to discriminate between any of them 2-month-olds also showed a preference for a natural arrangement of the features, but 1-month-olds did not. Thus, by 2 months infants may recognize how the features of a natural human face are arranged and generalize that knowledge to schematic faces.
Family history data on 99 autistic and 36 Down's syndrome probands are reported. They confirmed a raised familial loading for both autism and more broadly defined pervasive developmental disorders in siblings (2.9% and 2.9%, respectively, vs 0% in the Down's group) and also evidence for the familial aggregation of a lesser variant of autism, comprising more subtle communication/social impairments or stereotypic behaviours, but not mental retardation alone. Between 12.4 and 20.4% of the autism siblings and 1.6% and 3.2% of the Down's siblings exhibited this lesser variant, depending on the stringency of its definition. Amongst autistic probands with speech, various features of their disorder (increased number of autistic symptoms; reduced verbal and performance ability) as well as a history of obstetric complications, indexed an elevation in familial loading. No such association was seen in the probands without speech, even though familial loading for the lesser variant in this subgroup, was significantly higher than in the Down's controls. The findings suggest that the autism phenotype extends beyond autism as traditionally diagnosed; that aetiology involves several genes; that autism is genetically heterogeneous; and that obstetric abnormalities in autistic subjects may derive from abnormality in the foetus.
The study presents results from a clinical test battery (Bruyer & Schweich, 1991; Schweich & Bruyer, 1993) that is used to study components in the face recognition system of autistic children. The results of the autistics are compared with the performance of two age groups of normal children (7-10 years, 12-16 years) and an adult control group. Autistic subjects, like young children, make more errors on a task in which they have to match facial features in the context of a complete face but not when the features are presented in isolation or in a simplified facial context. Finally, the sensitivity of the battery for clinical populations other than prosopagnosics is discussed.
Children with diagnoses of either autism or Asperger's syndrome were matched on measures of verbal mental age with nonautistic control children. They were tested on their abilities to process both facial and nonfacial stimuli. There were no significant differences between the low ability autistic and control groups, but the high ability autistic and Asperger's children performed significantly worse than controls across all tests. Group averages masked substantial individual variation. The results are seen as indicating a general perceptual deficit that is not specific to faces or emotions. This appears to be a common correlate of autism and Asperger's syndrome, rather than a core symptom.
There is broad agreement that genetic influences are central in the development of idiopathic autism. Whether relatives manifest genetically related milder phenotypes, and if so how these relate to autism proper, has proved a more contentious issue. A review of the relevant studies indicates that relatives are sometimes affected by difficulties that appear conceptually related to autistic behaviors. These range in severity from pervasive developmental disorders to abnormalities in only one area of functioning, and possibly extend to related personality traits. Issues involved in clarifying the components of milder phenotypes and their relationship to autism are outlined.
Previous work based on observations of home videotapes indicates that differences can be detected between infants with autism spectrum disorder and infants with typical development at 1 year of age. The present study addresses the question of whether autism can be distinguished from mental retardation by 1 year of age. Home videotapes of first birthday parties from 20 infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, 14 infants later diagnosed with mental retardation (without autism), and 20 typically developing infants were coded by blind raters with respect to the frequencies of specific social and communicative behaviors and repetitive motor actions. Results indicated that 1-year-olds with autism spectrum disorder can be distinguished from 1-year-olds with typical development and those with mental retardation. The infants with autism spectrum disorder looked at others and oriented to their names less frequently than infants with mental retardation. The infants with autism spectrum disorder and those with mental retardation used gestures and looked to objects held by others less frequently and engaged in repetitive motor actions more frequently than typically developing infants. These results indicate that autism can be distinguished from mental retardation and typical development by 1 year of age.
This study utilized electroencephalographic recordings to examine whether young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have impaired face recognition ability. High-density brain event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to photos of the child's mother's face versus an unfamiliar female face and photos of a favorite versus an unfamiliar toy from children with ASD, children with typical development, and children with developmental delay, all 3 to 4 years of age (N = 118). Typically developing children showed ERP amplitude differences in two components, P400 and Nc, to a familiar versus an unfamiliar face, and to a familiar versus an unfamiliar object. In contrast, children with ASD failed to show differences in ERPs to a familiar versus an unfamiliar face, but they did show P400 and Nc amplitude differences to a familiar versus an unfamiliar object. Developmentally delayed children showed significant ERP amplitude differences for the positive slow wave for both faces and objects. These data suggest that autism is associated with face recognition impairment that is manifest early in life.
The broader autism phenotype (BAP) is a subclinical set of personality and other features that is thought to index familiality and/or genetic liability to autism. Eighteen parents of autistic probands with a history of language regression and 70 parents of autistic probands without regression were assessed for features of the BAP and compared with published rates in parents of nonautistic subjects. Parents of probands with regressive and nonregressive autism demonstrated similar rates of the BAP (27.8% vs. 32.9%; P = 0.33). The rate of the BAP was significantly higher in both groups of autism parents than in parents of nonautistic subjects (P < or = 0.01). Thus, this measure of genetic liability is increased equally in families with both forms of autism when compared with controls. Environmental events are therefore unlikely to be the sole cause of regressive autism in our sample. Environmental events, however, may act in an additive or "second-hit" fashion in individuals with a genetic vulnerability to autism.
There are two fundamentally different ways to attribute intentional mental states to others upon observing their actions. Actions can be interpreted as goal-directed, which warrants ascribing intentions, desires and beliefs appropriate to the observed actions, to the agents. Recent studies suggest that young infants also tend to interpret certain actions in terms of goals, and their reasoning about these actions is based on a sophisticated teleological representation. Several theorists proposed that infants rely on motion cues, such as self-initiated movement, in selecting goal-directed agents. Our experiments revealed that, although infants are more likely to attribute goals to self-propelled than to non-self-propelled agents, they do not need direct evidence about the source of motion for interpreting actions in teleological terms. The second mode of action-based mental state attribution interprets actions as referential, and allows ascription of attentional states, referential intents, communicative messages, etc., to the agents. Young infants also display evidence of interpreting actions in referential terms (for example, when following others' gaze or pointing gesture) and are very sensitive to the communicative situations in which these actions occur. For example, young infants prefer faces with eye-contact and objects that react to them contingently, and these are the very situations that later elicit gaze following. Whether or not these early abilities amount to a 'theory of mind' is a matter of debate among infant researchers. Nevertheless, they represent skills that are vital for understanding social agents and engaging in social interactions.
In this study, we investigated where people look on talkers' faces as they try to understand what is being said. Sixteen young adults with normal hearing and demonstrated average speechreading proficiency were evaluated under two modality presentation conditions: vision only versus vision plus low-intensity sound. They were scored for the number of words correctly identified from 80 unconnected sentences spoken by two talkers. The results showed two competing tendencies: an eye primacy effect that draws the gaze to the talkers eyes during silence and an information source attraction effect that draws the gaze to the talker's mouth during speech periods. Dynamic shifts occur between eyes and mouth prior to speech onset and following the offset of speech, and saccades tend to be suppressed during speech periods. The degree to which the gaze is drawn to the mouth during speech and the degree to which saccadic activity is suppressed depend on the difficulty of the speech identification task. Under the most difficult modality presentation condition, vison only, accuracy was related to average sentence difficulty and individual proficiency in visual speech perception, but not to the proportion of gaze time directed toward the talkers mouth or toward other parts of the talker's face.
The goal of this review of the research literature is to discuss approaches to the early detection of autism in infancy. Early detection would enable diagnoses to be made before 18 months of age rather than at 24-30 months, the age where diagnoses start to be made now. After summarizing the criteria for a deficit to be considered "core" to the disorder, the literature on research strategies used in early detection is examined. In order to guide the design of future studies, the review then turns to an overview of what is known about the processes of early social development in typically developing children that underlie the domains in which core deficits are manifested in young children with autism. The social domains covered in the review are those that show development in typically developing infants below 18 months of age: dyadic interaction and imitation; emotion discrimination; and attachment. The review concludes that all of these areas are worthy of investigation in young children, particularly those at higher risk of showing some of the core deficits of autism such as the infant siblings of children with autism.
Autism is a severe developmental disorder marked by a triad of deficits, including impairments in reciprocal social interaction, delays in early language and communication, and the presence of restrictive, repetitive and stereotyped behaviors. In this review, it is argued that the search for the neurobiological bases of the autism spectrum disorders should focus on the social deficits, as they alone are specific to autism and they are likely to be most informative with respect to modeling the pathophysiology of the disorder. Many recent studies have documented the difficulties persons with an autism spectrum disorder have accurately perceiving facial identity and facial expressions. This behavioral literature on face perception abnormalities in autism is reviewed and integrated with the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) literature in this area, and a heuristic model of the pathophysiology of autism is presented. This model posits an early developmental failure in autism involving the amygdala, with a cascading influence on the development of cortical areas that mediate social perception in the visual domain, specifically the fusiform "face area" of the ventral temporal lobe. Moreover, there are now some provocative data to suggest that visual perceptual areas of the ventral temporal pathway are also involved in important ways in representations of the semantic attributes of people, social knowledge and social cognition. Social perception and social cognition are postulated as normally linked during development such that growth in social perceptual skills during childhood provides important scaffolding for social skill development. It is argued that the development of face perception and social cognitive skills are supported by the amygdala-fusiform system, and that deficits in this network are instrumental in causing autism.
The classic experiments of Yarbus over 50 years ago revealed that saccadic eye movements reflect cognitive processes. But it is only recently that three separate advances have greatly expanded our understanding of the intricate role of eye movements in cognitive function. The first is the demonstration of the pervasive role of the task in guiding where and when to fixate. The second has been the recognition of the role of internal reward in guiding eye and body movements, revealed especially in neurophysiological studies. The third important advance has been the theoretical developments in the fields of reinforcement learning and graphic simulation. All of these advances are proving crucial for understanding how behavioral programs control the selection of visual information.
Previous research suggests that the phenotype associated with Asperger's syndrome (AS) includes difficulties in understanding the mental states of others, leading to difficulties in social communication and social relationships. It has also been suggested that the first-degree relatives of those with AS can demonstrate similar difficulties, albeit to a lesser extent. This study examined 'theory of mind' (ToM) abilities in the siblings of children with AS relative to a matched control group.
27 children who had a sibling with AS were administered the children's version of the 'Eyes Test' (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Stone, & Rutherford, 1999). The control group consisted of 27 children matched for age, sex, and a measure of verbal comprehension, and who did not have a family history of AS/autism.
A significant difference was found between the groups on the Eyes Test, the 'siblings' group showing a poorer performance on this measure of social cognition. The difference was more pronounced among female siblings.
These results are discussed in terms of the familial distribution of a neuro-cognitive profile associated with AS, which confers varying degrees of social handicap amongst first-degree relatives. The implication of this finding with regard to the autism/AS phenotype is explored, with some discussion of why this neuro-cognitive profile (in combination with corresponding strengths) may have an evolutionary imperative.
The literature on the importance of early identification and early intervention for children with developmental disabilities such as autism continues to grow. The increased prevalence of autistic spectrum disorders has fostered research efforts on the development and validation of autism-specific screening instruments for use with young children. There are currently several such autism-specific screening tools meant to be used with young children in various stages of development. Data from a few of these screening instruments have been published, and they include the Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (CHAT), Pervasive Developmental Disorders Screening Test (PDDST), Screening Tool for Autism in Two year olds (STAT), Checklist for Autism in Toddlers-23 (CHAT-23), and the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT). In this review, these five tools designed for use with children under three years old will be highlighted. In particular, the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT) will be discussed.
Abnormal smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEMs) are some of the most reproducible biological changes associated with the susceptibility for schizophrenia. Recent studies have suggested that deficit in predictive pursuit, a specific component of the SPEMs, marks schizophrenia susceptibility.
To test whether predictive pursuit contains less extraneous noise and may be under more direct genetic control than the traditional measure of overall pursuit performance using maintenance pursuit gain.
Familial aggregation estimation of the predictive pursuit measure and the traditional maintenance pursuit measure in sibling pairs from families of schizophrenic patients.
Outpatient clinics.
Patients with schizophrenia and their full siblings were recruited, provided that at least 1 sibling pair could be formed per family. Ninety-two siblings were recruited into the study. They formed 70 sibling pairs. Ninety healthy control subjects were also recruited using targeted local community advertisements based on patients' county of residence, aiming to capture the basic demographics of the regions from which the patients were recruited.
Familial correlations and heritability estimates of 2 SPEM measures: maintenance pursuit gain and predictive pursuit gain.
The sibling intraclass correlation coefficient of the predictive pursuit gain (r = 0.45-0.48) was significantly higher than that of maintenance pursuit gain (r = 0.02-0.20) (P = .005-.007). Variance component analysis suggested a high genetic loading for predictive pursuit (heritability = 0.90, SE = 0.22; P<.001) but relatively low heritability in the traditional maintenance pursuit measure (heritability = 0.27, SE = 0.21; P = .08).
These results suggest that predictive pursuit may index stronger genetic effect and may be better suited for genetic studies than the traditional SPEM measure of maintenance pursuit gain.
Broad-spectrum autism, referred to as pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), may be associated with genetic factors. We examined 241 siblings in 269 Japanese families with affected children. The sibling incidence of PDD was 10.0% whereas the prevalence of PDD in the general population in the same geographic region was 2.1%. Both of these rates are higher than those reported previously, probably because of the expanded clinical criteria applied. The prevalence in males of the general population was 3.3% and that in females was 0.82%. The sibling incidences were 7.7 and 20.0% for families in which the probands were male and female, respectively. Because the reversed sex ratios correspond to the general rule for a multifactorial threshold model, we suggest that most PDD cases result from the cumulative effects of multiple factors (mostly genetic). The sibling incidences were 0 and 10.9% for families in which the proband had low and normal birth-weight, respectively, suggesting the risk is lower in families with low-birth-weight probands.
To compare siblings of children with autism (SIBS-A) and siblings of children with typical development (SIBS-TD) at 4 and 14 months of age.
At 4 months, mother-infant interactional synchrony during free play, infant gaze and affect during the still-face paradigm, and infant responsiveness to a name-calling paradigm were examined (n = 21 in each group). At 14 months, verbal and nonverbal communication skills were examined as well as cognition (30 SIBS-A and 31 SIBS-TD).
Most SIBS-A were functioning as well as the SIBS-TD at 4 and 14 months of age. However, some differences in early social engagement and later communicative and cognitive skills emerged. Synchrony was weaker in the SIBS-A dyads, but only for infant-led interactions. Infant SIBS-A revealed more neutral affect during the still-face procedure and were less upset by it than was true for the SIBS-TD. A surprising result was that significantly more SIBS-A responded to their name being called by their mothers compared to SIBS-TD. At 14 months, SIBS-A made fewer nonverbal requesting gestures and achieved lower language scores on the Bayley Scale. Six SIBS-A revealed a language delay of 5 months and were responsible for some of the significant differences between SIBS-A and SIBS-TD. Furthermore, infant SIBS-A who showed more neutral affect to the still face and were less able to respond to their name being called by their mothers initiated fewer nonverbal joint attention and requesting behaviors at 14 months, respectively.
Focused on the genetic liability for the broad phenotype of autism as well as the possible influence of having a sibling with autism.