Deficits in making eye contact and limited ability to benefit from communicative and affective informationprovided through gaze are amongst the defining features of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in the secondand third year. Considering that gaze perception (GP) constitutes one of the key components of socialcognition these early deficits are likely to have a cascading effect on the development of more complexsocial-cognitive skills later on. Identification of specific GP skills that are impaired or spared by thepathogenic factors in ASD will be crucial for isolating the underlying mechanisms, designing diagnosticinstruments for infants, as well as selecting specific skill areas for treatment.
The specific aims of Project IIare to examine whether infants with ASD: (1) have impaired detection of and preference for faces with directgaze; (2) show selective impairment in detecting gaze-related spatial contingencies; (3) have impairments inperception of gaze-related intentional actions. We will also explore a possibility of identifying subtypes withinthe autism spectrum with regard to GP skills as well as the relationship between GP abnormalities andcognitive, social, adaptive and communicative functioning. The experimental outcome measures will bederived from visual fixation patterns and saccadic reaction measures recorded using an eye-tracking system.Participants will include 12- to 24-month-old infants with ASD (N=60), Developmental Delays (DD) (N=60),and Typical Developing (TD) controls (N=60). Targeting 12- to 24-month-old infants will allow theexamination of the emerging deficits in gaze processing in ASD at the same time as these skills develop andbecome fully functional in typical development and before their expression can be altered by treatment (e.g.,through explicit training to attend to faces and eyes). Through Project II we are striving to discoverbehavioral markers of ASD in infants, which could subsequently be utilized to develop feasible screeningmethods for infants. Further, identification of the aspects of gaze processing that are impaired and thosethat are preserved in ASD will provide valuable indicators regarding the neural mechanisms that might beaffected or preserved in late infancy, a period in which functional brain imaging is still very difficult toimplement.
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| Shic, Frederick (2016) Eye Tracking as a Behavioral Biomarker for Psychiatric Conditions: The Road Ahead. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 55:267-8 |
| Chawarska, Katarzyna; Ye, Saier; Shic, Frederick et al. (2016) Multilevel Differences in Spontaneous Social Attention in Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder. Child Dev 87:543-57 |
| Chawarska, Katarzyna; Chang, Joseph; Campbell, Daniel (2015) In Reply. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 54:958-9 |
| Klintwall, Lars; Macari, Suzanne; Eikeseth, Svein et al. (2015) Interest level in 2-year-olds with autism spectrum disorder predicts rate of verbal, nonverbal, and adaptive skill acquisition. Autism 19:925-33 |
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