Researchers study attention mechanisms of autistic children

March 30, 2009

Two-year-olds with autism lack an important building block of social interaction that prompts newborn babies to pay attention to other people. Instead, these children pay attention to physical relationships between movement and sound and miss critical social information. Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine report their results in the March 29 online issue of Nature.

"Human infants are born in a fragile state. They are entirely dependent on their caregivers for survival, and so it makes sense that infants would possess very early-emerging predispositions to seek their caregivers, to pay special attention to movements in the environment that are associated with human actions and gestures," said Ami Klin, director of the Program at Yale and the Harris Associate Professor of at the Yale Child Study Center.

Klin, who conducted the study with research scientist Warren Jones and colleagues at Yale, said that two-year-olds with autism showed no signs of this selective attention to these types of human movements. Instead, the with autism focused on a different environmental cue: they paid attention only to movements that were physically synchronous with sounds.

"Rather than attending to human biological motion, and the in that motion," said Klin, "children with autism were very sensitive to non-social information: to synchronies between sounds and motion in what they were watching."

Klin, Jones and colleagues tracked the eye movements of two-year-olds with and without autism while they watched cartoon animations. The animations were created with a technique borrowed from the video game industry in which movements of real people are recorded and then used to animate characters. In this case, the body movements were recreated as points of light on a black background, with one point of light at each joint in the body.

"The eye-tracking data revealed that typically-developing two-year-olds perceived human motion in these moving points of light. They saw people," said Jones. "But children with autism were insensitive to the socially relevant cues in that motion, and they focused instead on physical cues that typically-developing children disregarded."

Previous studies by the Yale team have shown that when looking at other people, toddlers with autism looked less at eyes and more at mouths. "The current results suggest something very important about that earlier research," said Klin. "Rather than looking at the social cues expressed in people's eyes, two-year-olds with autism may be paying attention, as in the current study, to synchronies between sound and motion. So rather than the eyes, they are focusing on the synchrony between lip motion and speech sounds."

"This suggests that from very early in life, children with autism are seeking experiences in the physical rather than the social world, and this in turn has far-reaching implications for the development of social mind and brain," said Jones.

The Yale group is now using this finding in their work with infant siblings of children with autism who are at greater genetic risk of also developing autism. "Because this mechanism emerges in the first days of life for typical children, we hope to use similar techniques to identify early signs of vulnerability in autism. This could be an aid for early diagnosis, which in turn allows for early intervention to maximize positive outcomes for these children," said Klin.

The next step is to study this phenomenon at earlier stages of development, and to combine the behavioral work with simultaneous neuroimaging through collaboration with another Yale colleague, Kevin Pelphrey.

Source: Yale University (news : web)


Rank 3 /5 (2 votes)
Relevant PhysicsForums posts

More news stories

Starve a virus, feed a cure? Findings show how some cells protect themselves against HIV

A protein that protects some of our immune cells from the most common and virulent form of HIV works by starving the virus of the molecular building blocks that it needs to replicate, according to research published online ...

Medicine & Health / Research

created 13 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Overeating may double risk of memory loss

New research suggests that consuming between 2,100 and 6,000 calories per day may double the risk of memory loss, or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), among people age 70 and older. The study was released today and will be ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created 10 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Declining health-care productivity in England: Who says so?

Reports that the National Health Service in England has been declining in productivity in the last decade appear to have been accepted as fact. However, a Viewpoint published Online First by The Lancet disputes this. The Vi ...

Medicine & Health / Health

created 8 hours ago | popularity 1 / 5 (1) | comments 1

Injured boomers beware: Know when to see doctor

(AP) -- It happened to nurse Jane Byron years after an in-line skating fall, business owner Haralee Weintraub while doing "men's" push-ups, and avid cyclist Gene Wilberg while lifting a heavy box.

Medicine & Health / Health

created 15 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 0

FDA-approved drug rapidly clears amyloid from the brain, reverses Alzheimer's symptoms in mice

Neuroscientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have made a dramatic breakthrough in their efforts to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease. The researchers' findings, published in the journal Science, show t ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Feb 09, 2012 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (58) | comments 17 | with audio podcast


Scientists discover molecular secrets of 2,000-year-old Chinese herbal remedy

For roughly two thousand years, Chinese herbalists have treated Malaria using a root extract, commonly known as Chang Shan, from a type of hydrangea that grows in Tibet and Nepal. More recent studies suggest that halofuginone, ...

New method to examine batteries -- MRI from the inside

There is an ever-increasing need for advanced batteries for portable electronics, such as phones, cameras, and music players, but also to power electric vehicles and to facilitate the distribution and storage of energy derived ...

Google might launch Drive for cloud storage soon

(PhysOrg.com) -- Google's next big move, according to the Wall Street Journal, is a cloud storage service called Drive. Hardly first to the plate, Google is simply catching up to introducing its cloud reposi ...

A mitosis mystery solved: How chromosomes align perfectly in a dividing cell

Although the process of mitotic cell division has been studied intensely for more than 50 years, Whitehead Institute researchers have only now solved the mystery of how cells correctly align their chromosomes during symmetric ...

Lab study raises questions over nano-particle impact

Tests involving chickens have raised questions about the impact on health from engineered nano-particles, the ultra-fine grains commonly used in drugs and processed foods, scientists said on Sunday.

Researchers find extensive RNA editing in human transcriptome

In a new study published online in Nature Biotechnology, researchers from BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, reported the evidence of extensive RNA editing in a human cell line by analysis of RNA-seq data, demons ...