Posts tagged eye contact
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
New study identifies signs of autism in the first months of life
Researchers at Marcus Autism Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University School of Medicine have identified signs of autism present in the first months of life. The researchers followed babies from birth until 3 years of age, using eye-tracking technology, to measure the way infants look at and respond to social cues. Infants later diagnosed with autism showed declining attention to the eyes of other people, from the age of 2 months onwards. The results are reported in the Nov. 6, 2013 advanced online publication of the journal Nature.
The study followed two groups of infants, one at low and one at high risk for having autism spectrum disorders. High-risk infants had an older sibling already diagnosed with autism, increasing the infant’s risk of also having the condition by 20 fold. In contrast, low-risk infants had no first, second, or third degree relatives with autism.
"By following these babies from birth, and intensively within the first six months, we were able to collect large amounts of data long before overt symptoms are typically seen," said Warren Jones, Ph.D., the lead author on the study. Teams of clinicians assessed the children longitudinally and confirmed their diagnostic outcomes at age 3. Then the researchers analyzed data from the infants’ first months to identify what factors separated those who received an autism diagnosis from those who did not. What they found was surprising.
"We found a steady decline in attention to other people’s eyes, from 2 until 24 months, in infants later diagnosed with autism," said co-investigator Ami Klin, Ph.D., director of Marcus Autism Center. Differences were apparent even within the first 6 months, which has profound implications. "First, these results reveal that there are measurable and identifiable differences present already before 6 months. And second, we observed declining eye fixation over time, rather than an outright absence. Both these factors have the potential to dramatically shift the possibilities for future strategies of early intervention."
Jones is director of research at Marcus Autism Center and assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine. Klin is director of Marcus Autism Center, chief of the Division of Autism & Related Disorders in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.
The researchers caution that what they observed would not be visible to the naked eye, but requires specialized technology and repeated measurements of a child’s development over the course of months.
"To be sure, parents should not expect that this is something they could see without the aid of technology," said Jones, "and they shouldn’t be concerned if an infant doesn’t happen to look at their eyes at every moment. We used very specialized technology to measure developmental differences, accruing over time, in the way that infants watched very specific scenes of social interaction."
Before they can crawl or walk, babies explore the world intensively by looking at it, and they look at faces, bodies, and objects, as well as other people’s eyes. This exploration is a natural and necessary part of infant development, and it sets the stage for brain growth.
The critical implications of the study relate to what it reveals about the early development of social disability. Although the results indicate that attention to others’ eyes is already declining by 2 to 6 months in infants later diagnosed with autism, attention to others’ eyes does not appear to be entirely absent. If infants were identified at this early age, interventions could more successfully build on the levels of eye contact that are present. Eye contact plays a key role in social interaction and development, and in the study, those infants whose levels of eye contact diminished most rapidly were also those who were most disabled later in life. This early developmental difference also gives researchers a key insight for future studies.
"The genetics of autism have proven to be quite complex. Many hundreds of genes are likely to be involved, with each one playing a role in just a small fraction of cases, and contributing to risk in different ways in different individuals," said Jones. "The current results reveal one way in which that genetic diversity may be converted into disability very early in life. Our next step will be to expand these studies with more children, and to combine our eye-tracking measures with measures of gene expression and brain growth."
Children of Blind Mothers Learn New Modes of Communication
A loving gaze helps firm up the bond between parent and child, building social skills that last a lifetime. But what happens when mom is blind? A new study shows that the children of sightless mothers develop healthy communication skills and can even outstrip the children of parents with normal vision.
Eye contact is one of the most important aspects of communication, according to Atsushi Senju, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at Birkbeck, University of London. Autistic people don’t naturally make eye contact, however, and they can become anxious when urged to do so. Children for whom face-to-face contact is drastically reduced—babies severely neglected in orphanages or children who are born blind—are more likely to have traits of autism, such as the inability to form attachments, hyperactivity, and cognitive impairment.
To determine whether eye contact is essential for developing normal communication skills, Senju and colleagues chose a less extreme example: babies whose primary caregivers (their mothers) were blind. These children had other forms of loving interaction, such as touching and talking. But the mothers were unable to follow the babies’ gaze or teach the babies to follow theirs, which normally helps children learn the importance of the eyes in communication.
Apparently, the children don’t need the help. Senju and colleagues studied five babies born to blind mothers, checking the children’s proficiency at 6 to 10 months, 12 to 15 months, and 24 to 47 months on several measures of age-appropriate communications skills. At the first two visits, babies watched videos in which a woman shifted her gaze or moved different parts of her face while corresponding changes in the baby’s face were recorded. Babies also followed the gaze of a woman sitting at a table and looking at various objects.
The babies also played with unfamiliar adults in a test that checked for autistic traits, such as the inability to maintain eye contact, not smiling in response to the adult’s smile, and being unable to switch attention from one toy to a new one. At each age, the researchers assessed the children’s visual, motor, and language skills.
When the results were compared to scores of children of “sighted” parents, the five children of blind mothers did just as well on the tests, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Learning to communicate with their blind mothers also seemed to give the babies some advantages. For example, even at the youngest age tested, the babies directed fewer gazes toward their mothers than to adults with normal vision, suggesting that they were already learning that strangers would communicate differently than would their mothers. When they were between 12 and 15 months old, the babies of blind mothers were also more verbal than were other children of the same age. And the youngest babies of blind mothers outscored their peers in developmental tests—especially visual tasks such as remembering the location of a hidden toy or switching their attention from one toy to a new one presented by the experimenter.
Senju likens their skills to those of children who grow up bilingual; the need to shift between modes of communication may boost the development of their social skills, he says. “Our results suggest that the babies aren’t passively copying the expressions of adults, but that they are actively learning and changing the way to best communicate with others.”
"The use of sighted babies of blind mothers is a clever and important idea," says developmental scientist Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences in Seattle. "The mother’s blindness may teach a child at an early age that certain people turn to look at things and others don’t. Apparently these little babies can learn that not everyone reacts the same way."
Meltzoff adds that there are many ways to pay attention to a child. “Doubtless, the blind mothers use touch, sounds, tugs on the arm, and tender pats on the back. Our babies want communication, love, and attention. The fact that these can come through any route is a remarkable demonstration of the adaptability of the human child.”
Yale researchers spot attention deficits in babies who later develop autism
Researchers at Yale School of Medicine are able to detect deficits in social attention in infants as young as six months of age who later develop Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, the results showed that these infants paid less attention to people and their activities than typically developing babies.
Katarzyna Chawarska, associate professor at the Yale Child Study Center, and her colleagues investigated whether six-month-old infants later diagnosed with ASD showed prodromal symptoms — early signs of ASD such as an impaired ability to attend to social overtures and activities of others. Before this study, it had not been clear whether these prodromal symptoms were present in the first year of life.
“This study highlights the possibility of identifying certain features linked to visual attention that can be used for pinpointing infants at greatest risk for ASD in the first year of life,” said Chawarska. “This could make earlier interventions and treatments possible.”
Why Children Think They Are Invisible when Covering Their Eyes
Dr. James Russell and a research team at the University of Cambridge recently published work on young children’s conception of personal visibility, which furthers the understanding of cognitive development and of our emerging sense of self.
The research involved children three to four years of age. Researchers placed an eye mask on each of the children and asked them if they could be seen when wearing it. They then asked each child if an adult who was wearing a similar mask could be seen. The majority of the children involved in the study believed they were not visible when wearing the mask. Most also believed that the adult wearing the eye mask was also hidden.
Additional tests revealed a unique layer of complexity, demonstrating that although the children thought they were invisible when there eyes were covered, they still believed that their head and body were able to be seen.
The research team concluded by process of elimination that the factor that makes children believe they are visible is eye contact with another person.
“… it would seem that children apply the principle of joint attention to the self and assume that for somebody to be perceived, experience must be shared and mutually known to be shared, as it is when two pairs of eyes meet,” the researchers reported. “Young children’s natural tendency to acquire knowledge intersubjectively, by joint attention, leads them to undergo a developmental period in which they believe the self is something that must be mutually experienced for it to be perceived.”
Evidently, children only believe they exist when making eye contact with another person. The implications point to a simple but necessary way to make children feel present and involved. Cultures worldwide seem to have some version of “peek-a-boo,” as a quick Google image search reveals. Lack of eye contact in children has been linked as an early sign of autism, while the presence of eye contact is associated with empathy. Dr. Russell’s team seems to have discovered a key facet of cognitive development.
The results of Dr. Russell’s study were published in the Journal of Cognition and Development.
(Source: united-academics.org)
Georgia Tech Creating High-Tech Tools to Study Autism
Researchers in Georgia Tech’s Center for Behavior Imaging have developed two new technological tools that automatically measure relevant behaviors of children, and promise to have significant impact on the understanding of behavioral disorders such as autism.
One of the tools—a system that uses special gaze-tracking glasses and facial-analysis software to identify when a child makes eye contact with the glasses-wearer—was created by combining two existing technologies to develop a novel capability of automatic detection of eye contact. The other is a wearable system that uses accelerometers to monitor and categorize problem behaviors in children with behavioral disorders.
Both technologies already are being deployed in the Center for Behavior Imaging’s (CBI) ongoing work to apply computational methods to screening, measurement and understanding of autism and other behavioral disorders.
The psychological techniques we use to avoid each other on the bus
A sociologist who rode coach buses for three years has codified the unspoken rules of avoiding total strangers.
"We live in a world of strangers, where life in public spaces feels increasingly anonymous," said sociologist Esther Kim of Yale University in a press release. “However, avoiding other people actually requires quite a lot of effort and this is especially true in confined spaces like public transport.”