Gliga, Teodora and Bedford, Rachael and Charman, Tony and Johnson, Mark H. (2015) Enhanced visual search in infancy predicts emerging autism symptoms. Current Biology 25 (13), pp. 1727-1730. ISSN 0960-9822.
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Abstract
In addition to core symptoms, i.e., social interaction and communication difficulties and restricted and repetitive behaviours, autism is also characterized by aspects of superior perception [1]. One well-replicated finding is that of superior performance in visual search tasks, in which participants have to indicate the presence of an odd-one-out element amongst a number of foils [2,3,4,5]. Whether these aspects of superior perception contribute to the emergence of core autism symptoms remains debated [6,4]. Perceptual and social interaction skills could reflect co-expressed but biologically independent pathologies, as suggested by a “fractionable” phenotype model of autism [7]. A developmental test of this hypothesis is now made possible by longitudinal cohorts of infants at high risk, such as of younger siblings of children with ASD. Around 20% of younger siblings are diagnosed with autism themselves [8], and up to another 30% manifest elevated levels of autism symptoms [9]. We used eye-tracking to measure spontaneous orienting to letter targets (O, S, V and +) presented amongst distractors (the letter X, Figure 1). At 9 and 15 months, emerging autism symptoms were assessed using the Autism Observation Scale for Infants (AOSI; 10) and at 2 years of age using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS; 11). Enhanced visual search performance at 9-month predicted a higher level of autism symptoms at 15 months and at 2 years. Infant perceptual atypicalities are thus intrinsically linked to the emerging autism phenotype.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | Co-authored by The Basis Team |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Jun 2015 09:23 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:17 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12328 |
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