Shifting Preferences for Primate Faces in Neurotypical Infants and Infants Later Diagnosed With ASD

Abstract

Infants look at others' faces to gather social information. Newborns look equally at human and monkey faces but prefer human faces by 1 month, helping them learn to communicate and interact with others. Infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) look at human faces less than neurotypical infants, which may underlie some deficits in social‐communication later in life. Here, we asked whether infants later diagnosed with ASD differ in their preferences for both human and nonhuman primate faces compared to neurotypical infants over their first 2 years of life. We compare infants' relative looking times to human or monkey faces paired with nonface controls (Experiment 1) and infants' total looking times to pairs of human and monkey faces (Experiment 2). Across two experiments, we find that between 6 and 18 months, infants later diagnosed with ASD show a greater downturn (decrease after an initial increase) in looking at both primate faces than neurotypical infants. A decrease in attention to primate faces may partly underlie the social‐communicative difficulties in children with ASD and could reveal how early perceptual experiences with faces affect development. Autism Res 2019, 12: 249–262 © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary Looking at faces helps infants learn to interact with others. Infants look equally at human and monkey faces at birth but prefer human faces by 1 month. Infants later diagnosed with ASD who show deficits in social‐communication look at human faces less than neurotypical infants. We find that a downturn (decline after an initial increase) in attention to both human and monkey faces between 6 and 18 months may partly underlie the social‐communicative difficulties in children with ASD.

How Do Children and Adolescents with ASD Look at Animals? A Scoping Review

“…Lastly, Scheerer et al [104] presented stimuli consisting of arrays of six items (1 AOI per item) on a screen. The number of AOIs varied according to the level of accuracy on the faces; Yamashiro et al [101] used only one AOI encompassing the entire face. This publication is the only one to offer children with ASD two faces simultaneously: either two faces or one face and a non-face stimulus.…”

“…Only three publications provided more details by specifying the exact dimensions or their definition criteria or by mentioning at least one example (i.e., [80,82,104]; respectively). Two publications mentioned the shape of their AOIs (i.e., oval [101]; square [80]).…”

“…The articles addressing this specific topic were published between 2010 and 2022, with at least one publication each year since 2010. The majority of these publications (12 papers out of 21 [82][83][84][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105]) were published during the last 5 years, with an acceleration in publication speed during the last years (i.e., from 2 papers per year in 2018 [97,98], to 4 papers in 2019 [83,[99][100][101], and 3 papers in 2020 [84,102,103]); then down to 2 papers in 2021, and finally one in 2022 (deceleration probably due to the COVID-19 health crisis in 2020 and 2021).…”

“…The smallest sample size was five participants [83,101] and the maximum was 98 [97] (Table 2). The mean number of participants per study was 24.1 ± 22.2.…”

Validation of the bodily expressive action stimulus test among Chinese adults and children

“…However, this deficit is not as prevalent as the core feature of face perception deficit, and the body perception ability of acquired facial agnosia patients is intact (Susilo et al, 2013). Further, studies found that patients with autism also have atypical facial gaze patterns (Nyström et al, 2017; Yamashiro et al, 2018). High‐risk children pay less attention to faces than low‐risk children (Nyström et al, 2017), and children who were later diagnosed with autism showed reduced attention on the face area as early as 6 months after birth (Shic et al, 2014).…”