Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 74, Issue 3, 1 August 2013, Pages 195-203
Biological Psychiatry

Archival Report
Decreased Spontaneous Attention to Social Scenes in 6-Month-Old Infants Later Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2012.11.022Get rights and content

Background

The ability to spontaneously attend to the social overtures and activities of others is essential for the development of social cognition and communication. This ability is critically impaired in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD); however, it is not clear if prodromal symptoms in this area are already present in the first year of life of those affected by the disorder.

Methods

To examine whether 6-month-old infants later diagnosed with ASD exhibit atypical spontaneous social monitoring skills, visual responses of 67 infants at high-risk and 50 at low-risk for ASD were studied using an eye-tracking task. Based on their clinical presentation in the third year, infants were divided into those with ASD, those exhibiting atypical development, and those developing typically.

Results

Compared with the control groups, 6-month-old infants later diagnosed with ASD attended less to the social scene, and when they did look at the scene, they spent less time monitoring the actress in general and her face in particular. Limited attention to the actress and her activities was not accompanied by enhanced attention to objects.

Conclusions

Prodromal symptoms of ASD at 6 months include a diminished ability to attend spontaneously to people and their activities. A limited attentional bias toward people early in development is likely to have a detrimental impact on the specialization of social brain networks and the emergence of social interaction patterns. Further investigation into its underlying mechanisms and role in psychopathology of ASD in the first year is warranted.

Section snippets

Participants

All infants (n = 117) participated in a prospective study of infants at risk for ASD due to genetic liability. The sample consisted of 67 high-risk and 50 low-risk infants. To be considered HR, an infant had to have an older sibling with a diagnosis of ASD. The older sibling’s diagnostic status was ascertained based on a review of assessment records, including the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Generic (41) and/or the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (42). Infants considered as LR

Total Looking Time at the Scene

Each child contributed data to at least one condition and 85% contributed to three or four conditions such that the number of participants in each condition ranged from 6 to 10 in ASD, 15 to 18 in HR-ATYP, 9 to 13 in HR-TYP, and 28 to 31 in LR-TYP. Loss of eye-tracking data was attributed to saccades and blinks, as well as inattention. A mixed effects model group×condition analysis performed on the average %Scene indicated a significant effect of group, F(3,263) = 7.25, p<.001 and condition, F

Discussion

The study examined spontaneous social monitoring in 6-month-old infants later diagnosed with ASD. The infants exhibited diminished attention in general to a social scene, and when they did attend, they spent less time monitoring the person and looked less at the person’s face. Interestingly, diminished attention to the person did not translate into enhanced attention to the highly perceptually and semantically attractive objects and suggests that, at least in this experimental context, there is

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