Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 January 2009, Pages 31-38
Biological Psychiatry

Archival Report
Neural Correlates of Eye Gaze Processing in the Infant Broader Autism Phenotype

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.09.034Get rights and content

Background

Studies of infant siblings of children diagnosed with autism have allowed for a prospective approach to study the emergence of autism in infancy and revealed early behavioral characteristics of the broader autism phenotype. In view of previous findings of atypical eye gaze processing in children and adults with autism, the aim of this study was to examine the early autism phenotype in infant siblings of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (sib-ASD), focusing on the neural correlates of direct compared with averted gaze.

Methods

A group of 19 sib-ASD was compared with 17 control infants with no family history of ASD (mean age = 10 months) on their response to direct versus averted gaze in static stimuli.

Results

Relative to the control group, the sib-ASD group showed prolonged latency of the occipital P400 event-related potentials component in response to direct gaze, but they did not differ in earlier components. Similarly, time-frequency analysis of high-frequency oscillatory activity in the gamma band showed group differences in response to direct gaze, where induced gamma activity was late and less persistent over the right temporal region in the sib-ASD group.

Conclusion

This study suggests that a broader autism phenotype, which includes an atypical response to direct gaze, is manifest early in infancy.

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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