Archival ReportNeural Correlates of Eye Gaze Processing in the Infant Broader Autism Phenotype
Section snippets
Participants
Sixty-two infants were recruited for this study, including 31 infant siblings of children with ASD (sib-ASD; 17 male, mean age = 10:1 months, SD = 1.5) and 31 infants who have no family history with ASD (control; 18 male, mean age = 10:1 months, SD = 1.6). All infants except one from the sib-ASD group were born full term. Informed consent was obtained from the parents. All infants in the sib-ASD group had an older brother or sister who had received a clinical diagnosis of an autism spectrum
Results
Twelve infants from the sib-ASD group and 14 from the control group were excluded because of excessive artifacts or for completing too few trials because of fussiness or fatigue. The final sample consisted of 19 sib-ASD and 17 control infants. The groups did not differ on a number of baseline measures, including the total number of trials or the number of valid trials retained for analysis (Table 1).
Discussion
Developmental models of autism have focused on understanding the precursors of the observed social difficulties including orienting to social stimuli and events, joint attention, imitation, and social interactions. Although various models propose alternative explanations of the origins of these difficulties (12, 53, 54), all agree that differences in attention to, or preference for, socially relevant information has an important contribution. Our findings are consistent with results indicating
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