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The scientists found that the amount of time
toddlers spent focused on the eyes predicted their level of social disability.
The less they focused on the eyes, the more severely disabled they were. These
results may offer a useful biomarker for quantifying the presence and severity
of autism early in life and screen infants for autism. The findings could aid
research on the neurobiology and genetics of autism, work that is dependent on
quantifiable markers of syndrome expression.
“The findings offer hope that these novel methods will enable the detection of
vulnerabilities for autism in infancy,” said Jones, a research scientist from
the Yale School of Medicine Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program and the Yale
Child Study Center. “We hope this technology can be used to detect and measure
signs of an emerging social disability, potentially improving a child’s outcome.
Earlier intervention would capitalize on the neuroplasticity of the developing
brain in infancy.”
Study collaborator Ami Klin, director of the Autism Program at the Child Study
Center, said they are now using this technology in a large prospective study of
the younger siblings of children with autism, who are at greater risk of also
developing the condition. “By following babies at risk of autism monthly from
the time they are born, we hope to trace the origins of social engagement in
human infants and to detect the first signs of derailment from the normative
path,” said Klin.
Jones and Klin are also engaged in parallel studies aimed at identifying the
mechanisms underlying abnormal visual fixation in infants with autism. “Our
working hypothesis is that these children’s increased fixation on mouths points
to a predisposition to seek physical, rather than social contingencies in their
surrounding world. They focus on the physical synchrony between lip movements
and speech sounds, rather than on the social-affective context of the entreating
eye gaze of others,” said Jones. “These children may be seeing faces in terms of
their physical attributes alone; watching a face without necessarily
experiencing it as an engaging partner sharing in a social interaction.”
Kevin Carr was also an author on the study.
Citation: Archives of General Psychiatry, 65(8),
946-954.
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