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Early Departures from Normative Processes of Social Engagement in Infants with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Book cover The Many Faces of Social Attention

Abstract

From the first moments of life, typically developing infants perceive social stimuli as relatively more salient than other competing stimuli. Through ongoing cycles of seeking and acting upon such stimuli, infants transform their understanding of the social world, leading to increasingly refined social abilities and specialized brain circuitry for social processing. By contrast, diminished interest in a wide variety of adaptive social stimuli is a pervasive, early emerging, and enduring feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Reduced attention to such stimuli exerts a compounding influence on development as a child with ASD fails to accrue an increasingly longer list of social experiences that would otherwise play a foundational role in social development and functional brain specialization. In this chapter, we review the canalizing role of preferential attention to social stimuli on behavior and brain development in typical infancy. We also review what is known about the early development of infants who are later diagnosed with ASD, with a focus on early departures from normative developmental trajectories of social visual engagement. We focus primarily on visual attention to the eyes of others as a paradigmatic example of an early emerging foundational social ability, that, when disrupted, is both a marker of emerging social disability and a compounding influence on subsequent development. Finally, we examine the accumulative consequences of departures from normative developmental trajectories of social visual engagement, as children with ASD develop increasingly greater specialization in things other than the social world.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marcus Autism Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Emory University School of Medicine, 1920 Briarcliff Road NE, 30329, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Sarah Shultz, Warren Jones & Ami Klin

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  1. Sarah Shultz
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  2. Warren Jones
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  3. Ami Klin
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Correspondence to Sarah Shultz .

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  1. Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Aina Puce

  2. Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Bennett I. Bertenthal

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Shultz, S., Jones, W., Klin, A. (2015). Early Departures from Normative Processes of Social Engagement in Infants with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In: Puce, A., Bertenthal, B. (eds) The Many Faces of Social Attention. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21368-2_6

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