Children with autism fail to orient to naturally occurring social stimuli

The eye gaze direction of an observed person can bias perception, memory, and attention in adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder

The reported experiments aimed to investigate whether a person and his or her gaze direction presented in the context of a naturalistic scene cause perception, memory, and attention to be biased in typically developing adolescents and high-functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A novel computerized image manipulation program presented a series of photographic scenes, each containing a person. The program enabled participants to laterally maneuver the scenes behind a static window, the borders of which partially occluded the scenes. The gaze direction of the person in the scenes spontaneously cued attention of both groups in the direction of gaze, affecting judgments of preference (Experiment 1a) and causing memory biases (Experiment 1b). Experiment 2 showed that the gaze direction of a person cues visual search accurately to the exact location of gaze in both groups. These findings suggest that biases in preference, memory, and attention are caused by another person's gaze direction when viewed in a complex scene in adolescents with and without ASD.

Physiological and behavioral differences in sensory processing: a comparison of children with autism spectrum disorder and sensory modulation disorder

A high incidence of sensory processing difficulties exists in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and children with Sensory Modulation Disorder (SMD). This is the first study to directly compare and contrast these clinical disorders. Sympathetic nervous system markers of arousal and reactivity were utilized in a laboratory paradigm that administered a series of sensory challenges across five sensory domains. The Short Sensory Profile, a standardized parent-report measure, provided a measure of sensory-related behaviors. Physiological arousal and sensory reactivity were lower in children with ASD whereas reactivity after each sensory stimulus was higher in SMD, particularly to the first stimulus in each sensory domain. Both clinical groups had significantly more sensory-related behaviors than typically developing children, with contrasting profiles. The ASD group had more taste/smell sensitivity and sensory under-responsivity while the SMD group had more atypical sensory seeking behavior. This study provides preliminary evidence distinguishing sympathetic nervous system functions and sensory-related behaviors in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Sensory Modulation Disorder. Differentiating the physiology and sensory symptoms in clinical groups is essential to the provision of appropriate interventions.

Recognition of emotional and nonemotional facial expressions: a comparison between Williams syndrome and autism

The aim of our study was to compare two neurodevelopmental disorders (Williams syndrome and autism) in terms of the ability to recognize emotional and nonemotional facial expressions. The comparison of these two disorders is particularly relevant to the investigation of face processing and should contribute to a better understanding of social behaviour and social cognition. Twelve participants with WS (from 6;1 to 15 years) and twelve participants with autism (from 4;9 to 8 years) were matched on verbal mental age. Their performances were compared with those of twelve typically developing controls matched on verbal mental age (from 3;1 to 9;2). A set of five tasks assessing different dimensions of emotional and nonemotional facial recognition were administered. Results indicated that recognition of emotional facial expressions is more impaired in Williams syndrome than in autism. Our study comparing Williams syndrome and autism over a small age range highlighted two distinct profiles which call into question the relationships between social behaviour/cognition and emotion perception.

The anterior insula in autism: under-connected and under-examined

Autism is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder of unknown etiology. While the past decade has witnessed a proliferation of neuroimaging studies of autism, theoretical approaches for understanding systems-level brain abnormalities remain poorly developed. We propose a novel anterior insula-based systems-level model for investigating the neural basis of autism, synthesizing recent advances in brain network functional connectivity with converging evidence from neuroimaging studies in autism. The anterior insula is involved in interoceptive, affective and empathic processes, and emerging evidence suggests it is part of a "salience network" integrating external sensory stimuli with internal states. Network analysis indicates that the anterior insula is uniquely positioned as a hub mediating interactions between large-scale networks involved in externally and internally oriented cognitive processing. A recent meta-analysis identifies the anterior insula as a consistent locus of hypoactivity in autism. We suggest that dysfunctional anterior insula connectivity plays an important role in autism. Critical examination of these abnormalities from a systems neuroscience perspective should be a priority for further research on the neurobiology of autism.

Vision in autism spectrum disorders

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are developmental disorders which are thought primarily to affect social functioning. However, there is now a growing body of evidence that unusual sensory processing is at least a concomitant and possibly the cause of many of the behavioural signs and symptoms of ASD. A comprehensive and critical review of the phenomenological, empirical, neuroscientific and theoretical literature pertaining to visual processing in ASD is presented, along with a brief justification of a new theory which may help to explain some of the data, and link it with other current hypotheses about the genetic and neural aetiologies of this enigmatic condition.

Detecting changes in naturalistic scenes: contextual inconsistency does not influence spontaneous attention in high-functioning people with autism spectrum disorder

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are often reported to be good at detecting minute changes in the environment. This study tested two factors in this phenomenon; detail-focus and reduced top-down influence of scene-schema expectations on spontaneous attention to visual scene elements. Using a change blindness paradigm, adults with ASD and matched typically developing (TD) adults were presented with images of naturalistic scenes (e.g., living room). Scene changes involved three types of object substitution: an object was replaced with (i) an unexpected scene-unrelated object, (ii) a scene-related object of a different basic-level category, (iii) or a different exemplar of the original object category. Top-down effects of scene-schema expectations should render scene-unrelated (i) substitutions easiest to recognize; detail focus should increase detection of exemplar changes. The TD group showed the expected condition effects, detecting scene-unrelated substitutions significantly better than both types of scene-related changes. By contrast, the ASD group showed no condition effect, and was only significantly slower and less accurate than the TD group in detecting scene-unrelated objects. These findings suggest reduced influence of schematic expectations on spontaneous attention in individuals with ASD. Together with other factors, this may contribute to the tendency to notice "irrelevant" changes in the environment.

Neural systems approaches to the neurogenetics of autism spectrum disorders

Autism is generally accepted as the most genetic of all the developmental neuropsychiatric syndromes. However, despite more than several decades of genetic study, the etiology of autism remains unknown, largely due to the genetic and phenotypic diversity, or heterogeneity, of this disorder, and the lack of biologically based classification systems. At the same time, in the neuroimaging literature, the body of research identifying candidate neural systems underlying aspects of autistic impairment has grown considerably, fueled by the advent of technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Yet the findings from these neuroimaging studies have not been incorporated to inform the collection of samples for genetic studies of autism, which are predominantly based on a diagnosis of the disorder. This article presents a review of the genetics of autism and describes the genetic approaches that have been applied, including the phenotypic strategies that have been used to address heterogeneity and optimize the power of these genetic studies. With the increasing recognition that there may be different "autisms" (Geschwind and Levitt, 2007) with unique neural mechanisms, it is argued that neural systems research, using technologies such as fMRI, currently allows for the identification of more biologically informative phenotypes for genetic studies of autism and is positioned to identify informative neuroimaging markers for "neurogenetic" studies of the disorder. To illustrate this, we describe several candidate neural systems for the social communication impairment seen in autism, and the characteristic behavioral and physiological manifestations associated with these that could be incorporated into phenotypic assessments.

Concept mastery routines to teach social skills to elementary children with high functioning autism

Children with autism are included in general education classrooms for exposure to appropriate social models; however, simply placing children with autism with typical peers is insufficient for promoting desired gains in social skills. A multiple baseline design was used to explore the effects of concept mastery routines (CMR) on social skills for four elementary-age boys with high functioning autism. Visual and non-parametric analyses support the conclusion that small group instruction with typical peers via the CMR was effective for increasing responses, initiations, and recognition of emotional states. The skills taught in small groups generalized when the visual strategy of the completed concept diagram was taken to another setting. Most importantly, the four boys experienced improved social status following intervention.

Gender in voice perception in autism

Deficits in the perception of social stimuli may contribute to the characteristic impairments in social interaction in high functioning autism (HFA). Although the cortical processing of voice is abnormal in HFA, it is unclear whether this gives rise to impairments in the perception of voice gender. About 20 children with HFA and 20 matched controls were presented with voice fragments that were parametrically morphed in gender. No differences were found in the perception of gender between the two groups of participants, but response times differed significantly. The results suggest that the perception of voice gender is not impaired in HFA, which is consistent with behavioral findings of an unimpaired voice-based identification of age and identity by individuals with autism. The differences in response times suggest that individuals with HFA use different perceptual approaches from those used by typically developing individuals.

Brain basis of human social interaction: from concepts to brain imaging

Modern neuroimaging provides a common platform for neuroscience and related disciplines to explore the human brain, mind, and behavior. We base our review on the social shaping of the human mind and discuss various aspects of brain function related to social interaction. Despite private mental contents, people can share their understanding of the world using, beyond verbal communication, nonverbal cues such as gestures, facial expressions, and postures. The understanding of nonverbal messages is supported by the brain's mirroring systems that are shaped by individual experience. Within the organism-environment system, tight links exist between action and perception, both within an individual and between several individuals. Therefore, any comprehensive brain imaging study of the neuronal basis of social cognition requires appreciation of the situated and embodied nature of human cognition, motivating simultaneous monitoring of brain and bodily functions within a socially relevant environment. Because single-person studies alone cannot unravel the dynamic aspects of interpersonal interactions, it seems both necessary and beneficial to move towards "two-person neuroscience"; technological shortcomings and a limited conceptual framework have so far hampered such a leap. We conclude by discussing some major disorders of social interaction.

Early Identification of Autism: Early Characteristics, Onset of Symptoms, and Diagnostic Stability

In the first year of life, infants who later go on to develop autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) may exhibit subtle disruptions in social interest and attention, communication, temperament, and head circumference growth that occur prior to the onset of clinical symptoms. These disruptions may reflect the early course of ASD development and may also contribute to the later development of clinical symptoms through alterations in the child's experience of his or her environment. By age 2, developmental precursors of autism symptoms can be used to diagnose children reliably, and by age 3, the diagnosis is thought to be relatively stable. The downward extension of the autism diagnosis poses important questions for therapists in designing interventions that are applicable for infants who demonstrate early risk factors. We review current knowledge of the early signs of ASD in the infancy period (0-12 months) and the manifestation of symptoms in toddlerhood (12- 36 months), noting the importance of considering the variability in onset and trajectory of ASD. Finally, we consider the implications of this emerging research for those who work or interact with young children, including the importance of early monitoring and the development and evaluation of age-appropriate interventions.

Reduced change blindness suggests enhanced attention to detail in individuals with autism

BACKGROUND

The phenomenon of change blindness illustrates that a limited number of items within the visual scene are attended to at any one time. It has been suggested that individuals with autism focus attention on less contextually relevant aspects of the visual scene, show superior perceptual discrimination and notice details which are often ignored by typical observers.

METHODS

In this study we investigated change blindness in autism by asking participants to detect continuity errors deliberately introduced into a short film. Whether the continuity errors involved central/marginal or social/non-social aspects of the visual scene was varied. Thirty adolescent participants, 15 with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and 15 typically developing (TD) controls participated.

RESULTS

The participants with ASD detected significantly more errors than the TD participants. Both groups identified more errors involving central rather than marginal aspects of the scene, although this effect was larger in the TD participants. There was no difference in the number of social or non-social errors detected by either group of participants.

CONCLUSION

In line with previous data suggesting an abnormally broad attentional spotlight and enhanced perceptual function in individuals with ASD, the results of this study suggest enhanced awareness of the visual scene in ASD. The results of this study could reflect superior top-down control of visual search in autism, enhanced perceptual function, or inefficient filtering of visual information in ASD.

Charting the typical and atypical development of the social brain

We describe recent progress in our program of research that aims to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify and delineate the brain systems involved in social perception and to chart the development of those systems and their roles as mechanisms supporting the development of social cognition in children, adolescents, and adults with and without autism. This research program was initiated with the intention of further specifying the role of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) region in the network of neuroanatomical structures comprising the social brain. Initially, this work focused on evaluating STS function when typically developing adults were engaged in the visual analysis of other people's actions and intentions. We concluded that that the STS region plays an important role in social perception via its involvement in representing and predicting the actions and social intentions of other people from an analysis of biological-motion cues. These studies of typically developing people provided a set of core findings and a methodological approach that informed a set of fMRI studies of social perception dysfunction in autism. The work has established that dysfunction in the STS region, as well as reduced connectivity between this region and other social brain structures including the fusiform gyrus and amygdala, play a role in the pathophysiology of social perception deficits in autism. Most recently, this research program has incorporated a developmental perspective in beginning to chart the development of the STS region in children with and without autism.

The Social Orienting Continuum and Response Scale (SOC-RS): a dimensional measure for preschool-aged children

Children with autism show deficits in social referencing, joint attention, orienting to their names, and social smiling as early as the first year of life. The present study describes the development of the Social Orienting Continuum and Response Scale (SOC-RS), a quantitative scale assessing each of these behaviors during the course of video-recorded Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) sessions. The SOC-RS was shown to be reliable and valid, and when applied to a longitudinal sample of children studied at 2 and 4 years of age, was shown to be sensitive to decreased levels of social referencing, joint attention, orienting to name, and social smiling in autism. The implications of these findings and potential applications of the SOC-RS are discussed.

A parallel and distributed-processing model of joint attention, social cognition and autism

The impaired development of joint attention is a cardinal feature of autism. Therefore, understanding the nature of joint attention is central to research on this disorder. Joint attention may be best defined in terms of an information-processing system that begins to develop by 4-6 months of age. This system integrates the parallel processing of internal information about one's own visual attention with external information about the visual attention of other people. This type of joint encoding of information about self and other attention requires the activation of a distributed anterior and posterior cortical attention network. Genetic regulation, in conjunction with self-organizing behavioral activity, guides the development of functional connectivity in this network. With practice in infancy the joint processing of self-other attention becomes automatically engaged as an executive function. It can be argued that this executive joint attention is fundamental to human learning as well as the development of symbolic thought, social cognition and social competence throughout the life span. One advantage of this parallel and distributed-processing model of joint attention is that it directly connects theory on social pathology to a range of phenomena in autism associated with neural connectivity, constructivist and connectionist models of cognitive development, early intervention, activity-dependent gene expression and atypical ocular motor control.

Joint engagement and the emergence of language in children with autism and Down syndrome

Systematic longitudinal observations were made as typically developing toddlers and young children with autism and with Down syndrome interacted with their caregivers in order to document how joint engagement developed over a year-long period and how variations in joint engagement experiences predicted language outcome. Children with autism displayed a persistent deficit in coordinated joint attention; children with Down syndrome were significantly less able to infuse symbols into joint engagement. For all groups, variations in amount of symbol-infused supported joint engagement, a state in which the child attended to a shared object and to language but not actively to the partner, contributed to differences in expressive and receptive language outcome, over and above initial language capacity.

Teaching Discrimination of Adult Gaze Direction to Children with Autism

Three young children diagnosed with autism did not reliably locate objects in the environment on the basis of an adult's gaze shifts. A training program designed to teach gaze following used the activation of remote controlled mechanical toys as both prompts and consequences. Over several training sessions, toy activation was progressively delayed following the adult's gaze-shift cues. All of the children eventually came to anticipate the toy activation and locate the target object on the basis of the adult's gaze-shift cue alone. Discrimination of another person's gaze direction is discussed in relation to joint attention deficits in children with autism.

Absence of embodied empathy during pain observation in Asperger syndrome

BACKGROUND

Asperger syndrome (AS) is a neurodevelopmental condition within the autism spectrum conditions (ASC) characterized by specific difficulties in communication, social interaction, and empathy that is essential for sharing and understanding others' feelings and emotions. Although reduced empathy is considered a core feature of ASC, neurophysiological evidence of empathic deficits before and below mentalizing and perspective taking is lacking. We explored whether people with AS differ from neurotypical control participants in their empathic corticospinal response to the observation of others' pain and the modulatory role played by phenomenal experience of observed pain and personality traits.

METHODS

Sixteen right-handed men with AS (aged 28.0+/-7.2 years) and 20 neurotypical controls (aged 25.3+/-6.7 years) age, sex, and IQ matched, underwent single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation during observation of painful and nonpainful stimuli affecting another individual.

RESULTS

When observing other's pain, participants with AS, in contrast to neurotypical control participants, did not show any amplitude reduction of motor-evoked potentials recorded from the muscle vicariously affected by pain, nor did their neurophysiological response correlate with imagined pain sensory qualities. Participants with AS represented others' pain in relation to the self-oriented arousal experienced while watching pain videos.

CONCLUSIONS

Finding no embodiment of others' pain provides neurophysiological evidence for reduced empathic resonance in people with AS and indicates that their empathic difficulties involve not only cognitive dimensions but also sensorimotor resonance with others. We suggest that absence of embodied empathy may be linked to changes at very basic levels of neural processing.

Brain mechanisms for social perception: lessons from autism and typical development

In this review, we summarize our research program, which has as its goal charting the typical and atypical development of the social brain in children, adolescents, and adults with and without autism. We highlight recent work using virtual reality stimuli, eye tracking, and functional magnetic resonance imaging that has implicated the superior temporal sulcus (STS) region as an important component of the network of brain regions that support various aspects of social cognition and social perception. Our work in typically developing adults has led to the conclusion that the STS region is involved in social perception via its role in the visual analysis of others' actions and intentions from biological-motion cues. Our work in high-functioning adolescents and adults with autism has implicated the STS region as a mechanism underlying social perception dysfunction in this neurodevelopmental disorder. We also report novel findings from a study of biological-motion perception in young children with and without autism.

Impaired prioritization of novel onset stimuli in autism spectrum disorder

BACKGROUND

Deficiency in the adaptive allocation of attention to relevant environmental stimuli is an associated feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recent evidence suggests that individuals with ASD may be specifically impaired in attentional prioritization of novel onsets.

METHOD

We investigated modulation of attention by novel onset stimuli in 22 children with ASD and 22 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children using a preview visual search task (Donk & Theeuwes, 2003). In preview search, a subset of search stimuli (old) is presented briefly before the remaining stimuli (new) with the effect that search times for targets appearing among the new elements are typically shorter than for those appearing among the old elements.

RESULTS

Whereas the TD group exhibited faster reaction time (RT) to targets occurring as novel search elements, the ASD group performed similarly in target new and old conditions, indicating impaired attentional prioritization of novel onsets. Group differences in eye-movement behavior, including fixation frequency and saccadic error for novel onset stimuli, were consistent with the RT findings. Attentional modulation by novel onsets varied inversely with social-communicative symptom severity in the ASD group.

CONCLUSIONS

The results provide further evidence of reduced sensitivity to novel onsets in ASD, and suggest that impaired processing of dynamic stimuli, possibly associated with abnormalities in the dorsal visual processing stream, may be implicated in the core symptoms of ASD.

Spontaneous imitation by children with autism during a repetitive musical play routine

Joint-attention-type intervention strategies have been identified as effective scaffolds for increasing social engagement in children with autism. Imitating children with autism within child-led social routines has increased children's attention and active participation in social interaction. The current study expands on this research by establishing a musical social milieu using repetitive imitation routines for four children with autism. Results were evaluated using an MPD across three behaviors and four children with an ABAB reversal for one child. Children increased spontaneous imitation of the researcher's models after being imitated with only social reinforcement for increased imitation. However, experimental control was weakened with carry-over effects for two children and failure to fully replicate results across participants and behaviors. The accumulation of evidence from varied studies, despite some mixed results, encourages further study into the effects of imitating children with autism to increase spontaneous social engagement.

Neural basis of self and other representation in autism: an FMRI study of self-face recognition

BACKGROUND

Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by decreased interest and engagement in social interactions and by enhanced self-focus. While previous theoretical approaches to understanding autism have emphasized social impairments and altered interpersonal interactions, there is a recent shift towards understanding the nature of the representation of the self in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Still, the neural mechanisms subserving self-representations in ASD are relatively unexplored.

METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS

We used event-related fMRI to investigate brain responsiveness to images of the subjects' own face and to faces of others. Children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children viewed randomly presented digital morphs between their own face and a gender-matched other face, and made "self/other" judgments. Both groups of children activated a right premotor/prefrontal system when identifying images containing a greater percentage of the self face. However, while TD children showed activation of this system during both self- and other-processing, children with ASD only recruited this system while viewing images containing mostly their own face.

CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE

This functional dissociation between the representation of self versus others points to a potential neural substrate for the characteristic self-focus and decreased social understanding exhibited by these individuals, and suggests that individuals with ASD lack the shared neural representations for self and others that TD children and adults possess and may use to understand others.

The role of face familiarity in eye tracking of faces by individuals with autism spectrum disorders

It has been shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) demonstrate normal activation in the fusiform gyrus when viewing familiar, but not unfamiliar faces. The current study utilized eye tracking to investigate patterns of attention underlying familiar versus unfamiliar face processing in ASD. Eye movements of 18 typically developing participants and 17 individuals with ASD were recorded while passively viewing three face categories: unfamiliar non-repeating faces, a repeating highly familiar face, and a repeating previously unfamiliar face. Results suggest that individuals with ASD do not exhibit more normative gaze patterns when viewing familiar faces. A second task assessed facial recognition accuracy and response time for familiar and novel faces. The groups did not differ on accuracy or reaction times.

Do children with autism 'switch off' to speech sounds? An investigation using event-related potentials

Autism is a disorder characterized by a core impairment in social behaviour. A prominent component of this social deficit is poor orienting to speech. It is unclear whether this deficit involves an impairment in allocating attention to speech sounds, or a sensory impairment in processing phonetic information. In this study, event-related potentials of 15 children with high functioning autism (mean nonverbal IQ = 109.87) and 15 typically developing children (mean nonverbal IQ = 115.73) were recorded in response to sounds in two oddball conditions. Participants heard two stimulus types: vowels and complex tones. In each condition, repetitive 'standard' sounds (condition 1: vowel; condition 2: complex tone) were replaced by a within stimulus-type 'deviant' sound and a between stimulus-type 'novel' sound. Participants' level of attention was also varied between conditions. Children with autism had significantly diminished obligatory components in response to the repetitive speech sound, but not to the repetitive nonspeech sound. This difference disappeared when participants were required to allocate attention to the sound stream. Furthermore, the children with autism showed reduced orienting to novel tones presented in a sequence of speech sounds, but not to novel speech sounds presented in a sequence of tones. These findings indicate that high functioning children with autism can allocate attention to novel speech sounds. However, they use top-down inhibition to attenuate responses to repeated streams of speech. This suggests that problems with speech processing in this population involve efferent pathways.

Visual disengagement in the infant siblings of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are impaired in visually disengaging attention in both social and non-social contexts. These impairments may, in subtler form, also affect the infant siblings of children with ASD (ASD-sibs). We investigated patterns of visual attention (gazing) in 6-month-old ASD-sibs (n=17) and the siblings of typically developing children (COMP-sibs: n=17) during the Face-to-Face/Still-Face Protocol (FFSF), in which parents are sequentially responsive, non-responsive, and responsive to their infants. Throughout the protocol, ASD-sibs shifted their gaze to and from their parents' faces less frequently than did COMP-sibs. The mean durations of ASD-sibs' gazes away from their parents' faces were longer than those of COMP-sibs. ASD-sibs and COMP-sibs did not differ in the mean durations of gazes at their parents' faces. In sum, ASD-sibs showed no deficits in visual interest to their parents' faces, but greater interest than COMP-sibs in non-face stimuli.

Self-experience as a mechanism for learning about others: a training study in social cognition

Using a gaze-following task, the authors assessed whether self-experience with the view-obstructing properties of blindfolds influenced infants' understanding of this effect in others. In Experiment 1, 12-month-olds provided with blindfold self-experience behaved as though they understood that a person wearing a blindfold cannot see. When a blindfolded adult turned to face an object, these infants gaze followed significantly less than control infants who had either (a) seen and felt the blindfold but whose view had not been obstructed by it or (b) experienced a windowed blindfold through which they could see. In Experiment 2, 18-month-olds experienced either (a) a trick blindfold that looked opaque but could be seen through, (b) an opaque blindfold, or (c) baseline familiarization. Infants receiving trick-blindfold experience now followed a blindfolded adult's gaze significantly more than controls. The authors propose 3 mechanisms underlying infants' capacity to use self-experience as a framework for understanding the visual perception of others.

Facial feedback mechanisms in autistic spectrum disorders

Facial feedback mechanisms of adolescents with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) were investigated utilizing three studies. Facial expressions, which became activated via automatic (Studies 1 and 2) or intentional (Study 2) mimicry, or via holding a pen between the teeth (Study 3), influenced corresponding emotions for controls, while individuals with ASD remained emotionally unaffected. Thus, individuals with ASD do not experience feedback from activated facial expressions as controls do. This facial feedback-impairment enhances our understanding of the social and emotional lives of individuals with ASD.

Eye-movements reveal attention to social information in autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition in which children show reduced attention to social aspects of the environment. However in adults with ASD, evidence for social attentional deficits is equivocal. One problem is that many paradigms present social information in an unrealistic, isolated way. This study presented adults and adolescents, with and without ASD, with a complex social scene alongside another, non-social scene, and measured eye-movements during a 3-s viewing period. Analyses first identified viewing time to different regions and then investigated some more complex issues. These were: the location of the very first fixation in a trial (indicating attentional priority); the effect of a task instruction on scan paths; the extent to which gaze-following was evident; and the degree to which participants' scan paths were influenced by the low-level properties of a scene. Results indicate a superficially normal attentional preference for social information in adults with ASD. However, more sensitive measures show that ASD does entail social attention problems across the lifespan, supporting accounts of the disorder which emphasise lifelong neurodevelopmental atypicalities. These subtle abnormalities may be sufficient to produce serious difficulties in real-life scenarios.

Social Attention and Real-World Scenes: The Roles of Action, Competition and Social Content

The present study examined how social attention is influenced by social content and the presence of items that are available for attention. We monitored observers’ eye movements while they freely viewed real-world social scenes containing either 1 or 3 people situated among a variety of objects. Building from the work of Yarbus (1965/1967) we hypothesized that observers would demonstrate a preferential bias to fixate the eyes of the people in the scene, although other items would also receive attention. In addition, we hypothesized that fixations to the eyes would increase as the social content (i.e., number of people) increased. Both hypotheses were supported by the data, and we also found that the level of activity in the scene influenced attention to eyes when social content was high. The present results provide support for the notion that the eyes are selected by others in order to extract social information. Our study also suggests a simple and surreptitious methodology for studying social attention to real-world stimuli in a range of populations, such as those with autism spectrum disorders.

Nonverbal communication skills in young children with autism

OBJECTIVE

The study was to examine nonverbal communication in young children with autism.

METHODS

The participants were 23 young children with autism (mean CA = 32.79 months), 23 CA and MA-matched children with developmental delay and 22 18-20-month-old, and 22 13-15-month-old typically developing toddlers and infants. The abbreviated Early Social Communication Scales [Mundy et al. 1996, Early social communication scales (ESCS)] were used to test three types of nonverbal communicative skills, i.e., joint attention, requesting, and social interaction. Both frequency and proportion analyses were done in group comparisons.

RESULTS

(1) Two- to three-year-old children with autism displayed deficits in joint attention ability, especially high-level skills. (2) The deficit in terms of frequency of communication was marked even compared with typically developing infants with younger mental age. (3) Young children with autism had different nonverbal communication profile compared with all three comparison groups.

CONCLUSION

Early social-communicative difficulties in autism involve early triadic communications involving joint attention and possibly dyadic turn-taking skills, which has implications for both early screening and early intervention.

Perspective-Taking from a Social Neuroscience Standpoint

A primary focus of research undertaken by social psychologists is to establish why perceivers fail to accurately adopt or understand other people's perspectives. From overestimating the dispositional bases of behavior to misinterpreting the motivations of out-group members, the message that emerges from this work is that social perception is frequently imperfect. In contrast, researchers from disciplines outside social psychology seek to identify the strategies and skill sets required to successfully understand other people's perspectives. These investigations attempt to identify the mechanisms through which perceivers intuit mental states that underlie behavior (e.g. wants, motivations, beliefs). In this article, we review findings from perspective-taking research in developmental psychology, primatology (i.e. primate cognition) and cognitive neuroscience. We then discuss why understanding how accurate perspective-taking occurs may inform understanding of when and why this process fails.

Attentional effects of gaze shifts are influenced by emotion and spatial frequency, but not in autism

OBJECTIVE

Impaired gaze following is an important hallmark of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in clinical settings. Yet, ASD subjects perform normally on laboratory tasks involving gaze shifts. We investigated this contradiction, hypothesizing that impaired gaze following in ASDs is not related to basic impairments in attention orienting but to impaired emotion perception and abnormal processing of spatial frequencies (i.e., local and global information).

METHOD

We tested 30 high-functioning, school-age children with ASDs and 30 age- and IQ-matched controls on a task involving gaze shifts that cue the location of targets. The cueing faces differed in emotionality and were filtered for different spatial frequencies. We recorded behavioral responses (reaction times) and brain responses (event-related potentials).

RESULTS

ASD subjects performed normally when neutral faces were used. However, emotional faces elicited modified face and gaze cue processing in control subjects, but not in the ASD subjects. Furthermore, the control group was biased toward the use of low spatial frequencies (global information) to process gaze cues, whereas the ASD group was biased toward the use of high spatial frequencies (local information).

CONCLUSIONS

We conclude that impaired gaze following in ASDs is related to impaired emotion processing. Moreover, ASD subjects show an abnormal reliance on local information to process gaze cues.

Altered face scanning and impaired recognition of biological motion in a 15-month-old infant with autism

Mounting clinical evidence suggests that abnormalities of social engagement in children with autism are present even during infancy. However, direct experimental documentation of these abnormalities is still limited. In this case report of a 15-month-old infant with autism, we measured visual fixation patterns to both naturalistic and ambiguous social stimuli: video scenes of a caregiver and point-light animations of human action. Results suggested that viewing patterns of the child with autism were driven by the physical contingencies of the stimuli rather than by their social context. If corroborated in larger studies, this observation would advance the hypothesis that mechanisms of social development which rely on preferential engagement with socially contingent conspecifics - and which emerge in the very first weeks of life in typical infants - are developmentally derailed in children with autism.

Audiovisual processing in children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Fifteen children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and twenty-one children without ASD completed six perceptual tasks designed to characterize the nature of the audiovisual processing difficulties experienced by children with ASD. Children with ASD scored significantly lower than children without ASD on audiovisual tasks involving human faces and voices, but scored similarly to children without ASD on audiovisual tasks involving nonhuman stimuli (bouncing balls). Results suggest that children with ASD may use visual information for speech differently from children without ASD. Exploratory results support an inverse association between audiovisual speech processing capacities and social impairment in children with ASD.

Brief report: young adults with autism spectrum disorder show normal attention to eye-gaze information-evidence from a new change blindness paradigm

Other people's eye-gaze is a powerful social stimulus that captures and directs visual attention. There is evidence that this is not the case for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), although less is known about attention to eye-gaze in adults. We investigated whether young adults would detect a change to the direction of eye-gaze in another's face more efficiently than a control change (presence/absence of spectacles). A change blindness method was used in which images showed faces as part of a complex, naturalistic scene. Results showed that adults with ASD, like typically developing controls, were faster and more accurate at detecting eye-gaze than control changes. Results are considered in terms of a developmental account of the relationship between social attention and other skills.

fMRI investigation of working memory for faces in autism: visual coding and underconnectivity with frontal areas

Brain activation and functional connectivity were investigated in high functioning autism using functional magnetic resonance imaging in an n-back working memory task involving photographic face stimuli. The autism group showed reliably lower activation compared with controls in the inferior left prefrontal area (involved in verbal processing and working memory maintenance) and the right posterior temporal area (associated with theory of mind processing). The participants with autism also showed activation in a somewhat different location in the fusiform area than the control participants. These results suggest that the neural circuitry of the brain for face processing in autism may be analyzing the features of the face more as objects and less in terms of their human significance. The functional connectivity results revealed that the abnormal fusiform activation was embedded in a larger context of smaller and less synchronized networks, particularly indicating lower functional connectivity with frontal areas. In contrast to the underconnectivity with frontal areas, the autism group showed no underconnectivity among posterior cortical regions. These results extend previous findings of abnormal face perception in autism by demonstrating that the abnormalities are embedded in an abnormal cortical network that manages to perform the working memory task proficiently, using a visually oriented, asocial processing style that minimizes reliance on prefrontal areas.

Children with autism demonstrate circumscribed attention during passive viewing of complex social and nonsocial picture arrays

Although circumscribed interests are a hallmark characteristic of autism spectrum disorders, providing a means for quantifying their functional impairment has proven difficult. We developed a passive viewing task to measure aspects of visual attention in children with autism spectrum disorders and typically developing controls. Task stimuli included picture arrays that were matched for social and nonsocial content. Nonsocial content was balanced to include items related to circumscribed interests (e.g., trains) as well as more commonplace items (e.g., furniture). Discrete aspects of gaze behavior were quantified using eye-tracking technology. Results indicate that visual attention in the autism group was more circumscribed (as indicated by the exploration of fewer images), more perseverative (as indicated by longer fixation times per image explored), and more detail oriented (as indicated by a greater number of discrete fixations on explored images). This pattern of results was similar for both social and object arrays. Within the autism group, overall severity of repetitive behavior symptoms correlated positively with exploration of object pictures and negatively with perseveration on social pictures. Results suggest that children with autism have a domain-general pattern of atypical visual attention that may represent an exaggeration of a typical attentional process and is related to a tendency to perseverate on images of interest and explore them in a more detail-oriented manner. Discrete measures of visual attention may therefore provide a reasonable means of quantifying aspects of the repetitive behavior phenotype in autism.

Developmental trajectories and correlates of sensory processing in young boys with fragile X syndrome

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

No longitudinal study on sensory processing in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS) exists. This study examined developmental trajectories and correlates of sensory processing from infancy through preschool years in 13 boys with FXS.

METHOD

Participants were assessed using observational and parent-report measures 2-6 times between 9 and 54 months of age.

RESULTS

Over time, an increasing proportion of boys displayed sensory processing that differed significantly from test norms. Observational measures were more sensitive than parent-reports early in infancy. Age and developmental quotient significantly predicted levels of hyporesponsiveness; there was a trend for hyperresponsiveness to increase with age. Baseline physiological and biological measures were not predictive.

CONCLUSIONS

Sensory processing problems are observable early and grow increasingly problematic from infancy through the preschool ages. Early identification and intervention may attenuate long-term difficulties for children with FXS.

Sensitivity to eye gaze in autism: is it normal? Is it automatic? Is it social?

Children with autism are developmentally delayed in following the direction of another person's gaze in social situations. A number of studies have measured reflexive orienting to eye gaze cues using Posner-style laboratory tasks in children with autism. Some studies observe normal patterns of cueing, suggesting that children with autism are alert to the significance of the eyes, whereas other studies reveal an atypical pattern of cueing. We review this contradictive evidence to consider the extent to which sensitivity to gaze is normal, and ask whether apparently normal performance may be a consequence of atypical (nonsocial) mechanisms. Our review concludes by highlighting the importance of adopting a developmental perspective if we are to understand the reasons why people with autism process eye gaze information atypically.

Early behavioral intervention, brain plasticity, and the prevention of autism spectrum disorder

Advances in the fields of cognitive and affective developmental neuroscience, developmental psychopathology, neurobiology, genetics, and applied behavior analysis have contributed to a more optimistic outcome for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These advances have led to new methods for early detection and more effective treatments. For the first time, prevention of ASD is plausible. Prevention will entail detecting infants at risk before the full syndrome is present and implementing treatments designed to alter the course of early behavioral and brain development. This article describes a developmental model of risk, risk processes, symptom emergence, and adaptation in ASD that offers a framework for understanding early brain plasticity in ASD and its role in prevention of the disorder.

Frequency and latency of social interaction in an inclusive kindergarten setting: a comparison between typical children and children with autism

This study investigated the frequency and latency of naturally occurring social interaction with typically developing children and those with autism in inclusive kindergarten settings. The children with autism were also subdivided into two groups according to intellectual functioning in order to analyze frequency and latency of social interaction in relation to degree of disability. The results showed a significant difference in frequency of social interaction between the typical children and those with autism. There was no difference between the groups on latency to initiate interaction. However, shorter latency was associated with higher frequency in the typical group but not in the group of children with autism. Significant differences in IQ and adaptive functioning were found between the children with autism who showed interaction and those who did not. The results for the typical children may be used as benchmark values for the assessment of treatment outcome for children with autism.

The empathic brain and its dysfunction in psychiatric populations: implications for intervention across different clinical conditions

Empathy is a concept central to psychiatry, psychotherapy and clinical psychology. The construct of empathy involves not only the affective experience of the other person's actual or inferred emotional state but also some minimal recognition and understanding of another's emotional state. It is proposed, in the light of multiple levels of analysis including social psychology, cognitive neuroscience and clinical neuropsychology, a model of empathy that involves both bottom-up and top-down information processing underpinned by parallel and distributed computational mechanisms. The predictive validity of this model is explored with reference to clinical conditions. As many psychiatric conditions are associated with deficits or even lack of empathy, we discuss a limited number of these disorders including psychopathy/antisocial personality disorders, borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, autistic spectrum disorders, and alexithymia. We argue that future clinical investigations of empathy disorders can only be informative if behavioral, dispositional and biological factors are combined.

Understanding autism and related disorders: what has imaging taught us?

Structural imaging studies of autism have documented increased total brain volume and early acceleration in brain growth. Functional MR imaging (fMRI) studies in autism have also led to the view of autism as a disorder of cortical functioning in which functional connectivity or synchronization of brain regions and cortical activity are disturbed with atypical cortical specialization.

A longitudinal study of pretend play in autism

This study describes a longitudinal design (following subjects described in Rutherford & Rogers [2003, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorder, 33, 289-302]) to test for predictors of pretend play competence in a group of children with autism. We tested the hypothesis that developmental change in pretend play performance can be predicted by earlier measures of either executive function, intersubjectivity, imitation, or general development. Participants at the time of follow-up testing were 28 children with autistic disorder (mean chronological age (CA) 57.6 months), 18 children with other developmental disorders (mean CA 59.0 months), and 27 typically developing children (mean CA 30.1 months). Children with autism were profoundly delayed given both competence (prompted) measures as well as performance (spontaneous) measures. Joint attention at time 1 strongly and uniquely predicted pretend play development.

Rate of head circumference growth as a function of autism diagnosis and history of autistic regression

Several reports indicate that autism spectrum disorder is associated with increased rate of head growth in early childhood. Increased rate of growth may index aberrant processes during early development, may precede the onset of symptoms, and may predict severity of the disease course. We examined rate of change in occipitofrontal circumference measurements (abstracted from medical records) in 28 boys with autism spectrum disorder and in 8 boys with developmental delay without autism from birth to age 36 months. Only children who had more than 3 occipitofrontal circumference measurements available during this age period were included. All data were converted to z scores based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention norms. Rate of growth from birth to age 36 months was statistically significantly higher for the autism spectrum disorder group than the developmental delay group, with children with autism spectrum disorder showing a statistically significant increase in occipitofrontal circumference relative to norms between 7 and 10 months; this group difference in rate of growth was more robust when height was used as a covariate. Rate of growth was not found to be different for children with autism spectrum disorder whose parents reported a history of loss of skills (regression) vs those whose parents reported early onset of autism symptoms. Findings from this study suggest that the aberrant growth is present in the first year of life and precedes the onset and diagnosis in children with autism spectrum disorder with and without a history of autistic regression.

Autism from developmental and neuropsychological perspectives

In this review of the research literature on autism, we argue that the application of developmental and neuropsychological perspectives has contributed importantly to the understanding of the core deficits in autism and their underlying neural bases. The three classes of theories postulated to explain the developmental and neuropsychological deficits in autism are considered in terms of the specificity, uniqueness, and universality of these impairments in autism. Because we believe that a primary reason for our lack of understanding of the developmental trajectory in autism stems from our inability to diagnose the syndrome in the first three years of life, research approaches to early identification are discussed, as are longitudinal studies aimed at identifying later-life outcomes and their predictors. In contrast to the progress made in defining the core deficits and arriving at criteria for diagnosis, less progress has been made in identifying the causes of autism and in creating and testing interventions aimed at ameliorating the impairments of autism, possibly because these activities have been less tied to the developmental and neuropsychological models that have enlightened the investigation of core deficits.