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

Abstract

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are impaired in visually disengaging attention in both social and non-social contexts, impairments that may, in subtler form, also affect the infant siblings of children with an ASD (ASD-sibs). We investigated patterns of visual attention (gazing) in six-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, nonresponsive, 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 COMPsibs. 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.

Autistic Traits Below the Clinical Threshold: Re-examining the Broader Autism Phenotype in the 21st Century

“…The results of current studies are slightly mixed but there is some evidence that siblings who are at-risk for autism display early problems disengaging from stimuli and spend longer periods attending to non-social stimuli (e.g. see Ibanez et al 2008;Bhat et al 2010). Similar findings were reported by Elsabbagh et al (2009b) who tested 9-10 month old siblings of autistic probands using a visual orienting task that measured the time taken to disengage from a central stimulus in order to fixate on a peripheral one.…”

“…Siblings later classified as 'BAP+' also displayed deficits responding to joint attention compared to siblings later classified as 'BAP-' (Sullivan et al 2007). Other social behavioural deficits detected in at-risk siblings include reduced frequency of requesting behaviours (Goldberg et al 2005;Cassel et al 2007), reduced response to social interaction (Goldberg et al 2005) and differences in eye gaze movements; for example, shifting gaze to and from the caregiver less frequently (Ibanez et al 2008), gazing away from the caregiver for longer periods (Ibanez et al 2008), gazing less at the caregiver's eyes relative to the mouth (Merin et al 2007) and looking less at the caregiver and more at a novel object during a social-object learning task (Bhat et al 2010). However, it is important to note that in a number of these studies there was no longitudinal follow-up to determine whether the infants that performed poorly on these tasks would express BAP traits later in development (e.g.…”

“…The FFSF task has also been used to investigate eye gazing/ visual attention, with various studies reporting differences in eye gaze movements towards the caregiver and inanimate objects between at-risk siblings and low-risk, typically developing controls (e.g. Ibanez et al 2008;Bhat et al 2010;Merin et al 2007). These studies suggest that differences in eye gaze movements could be an early indicator of the BAP.…”

Automated classification of gaze direction using spectral regression and support vector machine

“…This study included a subset (eight subjects) of a large infantparent dyads face-to-face study [13]. Infants participated in this study were six-month-old.…”

Rastreamento de sinais e sintomas de transtornos do espectro do autismo em irmãos

“…O fenótipo dos TEA é heterogêneo e, embora apresente uma etiologia multifatorial, é o único transtorno neuropsiquiátrico no qual se tem mostrado considerável influência da herdabilidade [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] . Essa influência hereditária tem conduzido à realização de diversos estudos para identificar alterações neurocomportamentais em irmãos de crianças diagnosticadas com TEA [13][14][15][16][17] . Os primeiros estudos, que apresentaram taxas de recorrência entre 90 e 96% para gêmeos monozigóticos e de 0 a 24% em dizigóticos, datam dos anos 1980 e 1990 [18][19][20] .…”