Daniel S Messinger

• University of Miami

In inclusive preschools, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other developmental disabilities (DD) are less socially engaged with peers than are typically developing (TD) children. However, there is limited objective information describing how children with ASD engage with teachers, or how teacher engagement compares to engagement with...

Although vocabulary size is thought to index children's language abilities, an increasing body of work suggests that regularities in children's vocabulary composition, particularly the proportion of shape‐based nouns (e.g., cup), support language development. Here we examine initial vocabulary composition in children with hearing loss following coc...

Recent empirical studies found different thermodynamic phases for collective motion in animals. However, such a thermodynamic description of human movement remains unclear. Existing studies of traffic and pedestrian flows have primarily focused on relatively high-speed mobility data, revealing only a fluid-like phase. This focus is partly because t...

Developmental theorists emphasize dyadic processes in language development. Empirical research has focused on the interaction of caregiver-infant dyads in home settings, which does not readily allow us to tease apart dyadic from individual processes, critical for understanding language and communication challenges. The preschool classroom is one un...

In the still-face episode of the Face-to-Face/Still-Face (FFSF), parents are asked to become unresponsive. However, infant-parent interaction may be irrepressible, and there is some evidence that interaction during the still-face is associated with attachment outcome. To explore these questions, we independently coded the continuous affective valen...

Facial expressions are among the earliest behaviors infants use to express emotional states, and are crucial to preverbal social interaction. Manual coding of infant facial expressions, however, is laborious and poses limitations to replicability. Recent developments in computer vision have advanced automated facial expression analyses in adults, p...

Sensing technologies that provide continuous, real-time information about teachers’ and students’ individual experiences are increasingly being applied to classroom-based research. Sensing technologies provide a possible alternative to costly and time-intensive in-person or hand-coded observations and have the potential to increase our present unde...

Socioemotional and referential communication are primary expressions of interpersonal engagement in infancy and beyond. Early socioemotional communication in dyadic interactions may form a foundation for triadic referential communication and gesture production, yet the role of temperament in moderating their association has not been examined. We in...

Gaze coupling and joint attention characterize human communication from infancy onward. We review research on infant gaze coupling in face-to-face interactions and joint attention in triadic interactions involving objects. Gaze coupling characterizes early dyadic exchanges in which the infant gazes at the interaction partner who is typically gazing...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a group of complex neurodevelopmental disorders that affects about 1% of the world’s population, impacting the quality of life of not only the diagnosed individuals but also their communities. Early detection and intervention are paramount to limit its effect on a child’s development, however overlap with other dis...

Purpose: Prior work developed a shortened 16-item version of the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), a quantitative measure of social communication and autism spectrum disorder (ASD)-related traits. However, its properties for use in risk factor estimation have not been fully tested compared to the full SRS. We compared the associations between ges...

Infant social communication is organized in time. However, little is known about its development in the first year of life, and the role of the infant’s interaction partner in this coordination. We go beyond previous event-based conceptualization of early infant communication to ask how infant action in one behavioral modality influences infant act...

Although still-face effects are well-studied, little is known about the degree to which the Face-to-Face/Still-Face (FFSF) is associated with the production of intense affective displays. Duchenne smiling expresses more intense positive affect than non-Duchenne smiling, while Duchenne cry-faces express more intense negative affect than non-Duchenne...

Presented in the Symposium: “Beyond Maternal Sensitivity: Shedding Light on Different Facets of Parent-Child Interaction Quality”

Classroom engagement plays a crucial role in preschoolers’ development, yet the correlates of engagement, especially among children with autism spectrum disor- der (ASD) and developmental delays (DD), remains unknown. This study exam- ines levels of engagement with classroom social partners and tasks among children in three groups ASD, DD, and typi...

Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC), is a neurocutaneous disorder, associated with a high prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD; ∼50% of individuals). As TSC is a leading cause of syndromic ASD, understanding language development in this population would not only be important for individuals with TSC but may also have implications for those with...

Preschoolers’ language abilities are associated with their social interactions in early childhood classrooms. Few studies, however, have examined associations between social interactions and objective measures of children’s real-time classroom language environments, information key to informing interventions to support preschool children at risk fo...

Infants vary in their ability to follow others' gazes, but it is unclear how these individual differences emerge. We tested whether social motivation levels in early infancy predict later gaze following skills. We longitudinally tracked infants' (N = 82) gazes and pupil dilation while they observed videos of a woman looking into the camera simulati...

Best practice for the assessment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptom severity relies on clinician ratings of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd Edition (ADOS-2), but the association of these ratings with objective measures of children’s social gaze and smiling is unknown. Sixty-six preschool-age children (49 boys, M = 39.97 month...

Emotional and referential communication are primary expressions of social engagement in infancy and beyond. Although early patterns of dyadic emotional communication may form a foundation for triadic referential communication and gesture production, the role of temperament in moderating their association has not been examined. We investigated wheth...

Homophily, the tendency for individuals to preferentially interact with others similar to themselves is typically documented via self-report and, for children, adult report. Few studies have investigated homophily directly using objective measures of social movement. We quantified homophily in children with developmental disabilities (DD) and typic...

50 words): Preschool classrooms provide a unique context for social engagement/learning in autistic children. Location tracking was used to derive objective measures of social contact in preschool inclusion classrooms. Results demonstrate the concurrent validity of objective measures of social contact with teacher-rated measures of social abilities...

Recent empirical studies found different thermodynamic phases for collective motion in animals. However, such a thermodynamic description for human movement remains unclear, mainly due to the limited resolution of existing tracking technologies. In this Letter, we used a new ultra-wideband radio frequency identification technology to collect high-r...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing in classrooms has become commonplace. However, there are little data on the effect of face-masks on children’s language input and production in educational contexts, like preschool classrooms which over half of United States children attend. Leveraging repeated objective measurements, we longitudinally exa...

In childhood, higher levels of temperamental fear—an early‐emerging proclivity to distress in the face of novelty—are associated with lower social responsivity and greater social anxiety. While the early emergence of temperamental fear in infancy is poorly understood, it is theorized to be driven by individual differences in reactivity and self‐reg...

Fully understanding autism spectrum disorder (ASD) genetics requires whole-genome sequencing (WGS). We present the latest release of the Autism Speaks MSSNG resource, which includes WGS data from 5,100 individuals with ASD and 6,212 non-ASD parents and siblings (total n = 11,312). Examining a wide variety of genetic variants in MSSNG and the Simons...

Dynamic systems concepts are prevalent in developmental psychology but there have been few formal applications of theory of dynamics to children's behavior in naturalistic contexts (see O. Ossmy et al. 2020). We seek to rectify this situation using precise measurement of children's behavior combined with an explicit model of phase-transition. Speci...

The way infants differ in employing the attention and emotion control mechanisms they acquire over the first year of life has been of primary interest to understanding, predicting, and even enhancing the developmental course of crucial later-life socio-cognitive outcomes such as executive functioning. Introducing automatic measures to study these p...

Presented in Symposium: “Emergence, Origins, and Communicative Significance of Deictic Gestures in the First Year of Life”. Abstract: In the first year of life, infants can express their arousal or emotional ambivalence when confronted with novel social situations by displaying positive expressions of shyness, or coy smiles (Colonnesi et al., 2013;...

Preverbal social interactions are characterized by dynamic, multimodal face-to-face communication. Contextual factors, like the familiarity of the interaction partner, and individual predispositions, such as temperament, all contribute in shaping socio-emotional development. Prior research has described infant communication with mothers, and occasi...

Facial expressions are crucial to pre-verbal social interactions and among the earliest behaviors that can be used for inferring infant emotional states. Recent developments in computer vision have brought about substantial advances in automatic facial expression analyses in adults, yielding rich, potentially reproducible results at a relatively lo...

Children with hearing loss often attend inclusive preschool classrooms aimed at improving their spoken language skills. Although preschool classrooms are fertile environments for vocal interaction with peers, little is known about the dyadic processes that influence children's speech to one another and foster their language abilities and how these...

While previous work has identified the early predictors of language skills in infants at elevated familial risk (ER) and low familial risk (LR) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), no studies to date have explored whether these predictors vary based on diagnostic outcome of ASD or no ASD. The present study used a large, multisite dataset to examine...

Automated detection of facial action units in infants is challenging. Infant faces have different proportions, less texture, fewer wrinkles and furrows, and unique facial actions relative to adults. For these and related reasons, action unit (AU) detectors that are trained on adult faces may generalize poorly to infant faces. To train and test AU d...

Fully understanding the genetic factors involved in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) requires whole-genome sequencing (WGS), which theoretically allows the detection of all types of genetic variants. With the aim of generating an unprecedented resource for resolving the genomic architecture underlying ASD, we analyzed genome sequences and phenotypic...

Interaction with unfamiliar partners is a component of social life from infancy onward. Yet little is known about preverbal communication with strangers. This study compared the development of infant communication with strangers to communication with mothers and fathers and examined the contribution of temperament to partner‐specific communication...

Assessment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relies on expert clinician observation and judgment, but objective measurement tools have the potential to provide additional information on ASD symptom severity. Diagnostic evaluations for ASD typically include the autism diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS‐2), a semi‐structured assessment composed of...

Prior work has examined associations between cardiometabolic pregnancy complications and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but not how these complications may relate to social communication traits more broadly. We addressed this question within the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program, with 6,778 participants from 40 cohor...

Current models of COVID-19 transmission predict infection from reported or assumed interactions. Here we leverage high-resolution observations of interaction to simulate infectious processes. Ultra-Wide Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems were employed to track the real-time physical movements and directional orientation of children and t...

Audio-visual recording and location tracking produce enormous quantities of digital data with which researchers can document children's everyday interactions in naturalistic settings and assessment contexts. Machine learning and other computational approaches can produce replicable, automated measurements of these big behavioral data. The economies...

This volume concerns emotional development and includes contributions from leading experts in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, sociology, primatology, philosophy, history, cognitive science, computer science, and education. This is the first volume of its kind to include such a multidisciplinary group of experts to consider emotional develop...

Early interaction is a dynamic, emotional process in which infants influence and are influenced by caregivers and peers. This chapter reviews new developments in behavior imaging—objective quantification of human action—and computational approaches to the study of early emotional interaction and development. Advances in the automated measurement an...

Infant attachment is a key predictor of later socioemotional functioning, but it is not clear how parental responsivity to infant expressive behavior is associated with attachment outcomes. A mid-range model of responsivity holds that both unresponsive and highly reactive parental behaviors lead to insecure and disorganized attachment. We examined...

Over half of US children are enrolled in preschools, where the quantity and quality of language input from teachers are likely to affect children's language development. Leveraging repeated objective measurements, we examined the rate per minute and phonemic diversity of child and teacher speech-related vocalizations in preschool classrooms and the...

Current models of COVID-19 transmission predict infection from reported or assumed interactions. Here we leverage high-resolution observations of interaction to simulate infectious processes. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems were employed to track the real-time physical movements and directional orientation of children and their teache...

Prior work proposed a shortened version of the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), a commonly used quantitative measure of social communication traits. We used data from 3031 participants (including 190 ASD cases) from the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program to compare distributional properties and criterion validity of...

Infant attachment is a critical indicator of healthy infant social-emotional functioning, which is typically measured using the gold-standard Strange Situation Procedure (SSP). However, expert-based attachment classifications from the SSP are time-intensive (with respect both to expert training and rating), and do not provide an objective, continuo...

Children's preschool experiences have consequences for development. However, it is not clear how children's real‐time interactions with peers affect their language development; nor is it clear whether these processes differ between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and two other groups of children, those with general developmental delays...

The purely descriptive definition of autism introduced by the DSM III in 1980 marked a departure from previous DSM editions, which mixed phenomenological descriptions with psychoanalytic theories of etiology. This provided a blank slate upon which a variety of novel theories emerged to conceptualize autism and its treatment in the following four de...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at considerable risk for difficulties with emotion regulation and related functioning. Although it is commonly accepted that parents contribute to adaptive child regulation, as indexed by observable child behavior, theory and recent evidence suggest that parenting may also influence relevant underlyi...

Background. Atypicalities in social approach are thought to be characteristic of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but few studies have quantified the social movement of children with ASD using objective measures. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new method—computational modeling of radio frequency identification (RFID) child...

Head movement is an important but often overlooked component of emotion and social interaction. Examination of regularity and differences in head movements of infant-mother dyads over time and across dyads can shed light on whether and how mothers and infants alter their dynamics over the course of an interaction to adapt to each others. One way to...

Advanced parental age is a well‐replicated risk factor for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental condition with a complex and not well‐defined etiology. We sought to determine parental age associations with ASD‐related outcomes in subjects at high familial risk for ASD. A total of 397 younger siblings of a child with ASD, drawn from...

Although difficulties with social relationships are key to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), no previous study has examined infant attachment security prior to ASD diagnosis. We prospectively assessed attachment security at 15 months in high-risk infants with later ASD (High-Risk/ASD, n=16), high-risk infants without later ASD (High-Risk/No-ASD, n=40...

The present study validates a new procedure that combines continuous measures of proximity (Ubisense) and vocalization (LENA) into measures of peer social interaction. The data were collected from 4 boys and 5 girls (ages 2–3 at the outset) on 8 separate days (3–4 hours per day) over the course of an academic year. Teacher reports of friendship wer...

Children with autism spectrum disorder exhibit significant difficulties with emotion regulation. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia is a biomarker for processes related to emotion regulation, with higher baseline rates linked to beneficial outcomes. Although reduction in respiratory sinus arrhythmia in response to challenge can index adaptive processes i...

Identification of genetic biomarkers associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) could improve recurrence prediction for families with a child with ASD. Here, we describe clinical microarray findings for 253 longitudinally phenotyped ASD families from the Baby Siblings Research Consortium (BSRC), encompassing 288 infant siblings. By age 3, 103...

Importance Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with different genetic etiologies. Prospective examination of familial-risk infants informs understanding of developmental trajectories preceding ASD diagnosis, potentially improving early detection. Objective To compare outcomes and trajectories associated with...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit significant difficulties with emotion regulation and reactivity, which may be linked to underlying psychophysiology. The present study examined associations between autonomic nervous system activity and individual differences in externalizing behavior problems in children with ASD. A multisystem...

Happiness and joy involve feelings of positive engagement which are prototypically expressed through the face, voice, and body. Joyful smiles tend to be strong and involve both eye constriction (the Duchenne marker) and mouth opening. Through approximately 2 months of age, joyful expressions are primarily rooted in physiological arousal. Positive e...

Human observations can only capture a portion of ongoing classroom social activity, and are not ideal for understanding how children’s interactions are spatially structured. Here we demonstrate how social interaction can be investigated by modeling automated continuous measurements of children’s location and movement using a commercial system based...

Research has identified early appearing differences in gross and fine motor abilities in infants at heightened risk (HR) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) because they are the younger siblings of children with ASD, and it suggests that such differences may be especially apparent among those HR infants themselves eventually diagnosed with ASD. The...

Abstract Infant looking patterns during interaction offer an early window into social and nonsocial engagement. Recent evidence indicates that infant looks exhibit temporal dependency—one look duration predicts the next look duration. It is unknown, however, whether temporal dependency emerges as infants structure their own looking or whether it is...

Parallel Session: Socially Grounded Interactions

We (Meltzoff et al., 2018) described how Oostenbroek et al.'s (2016) design likely dampened infant imitation. In their commentary, Oostenbroek et al. (in press) argue that our points are post hoc. It is important for readers to know that they are not. Our paper re‐stated “best practices” described in published papers. Based on the literature, the d...

Children from low SES backgrounds hear, on average, fewer words at home than those from high SES backgrounds. This word gap is associated with widening achievement differences in children’s language abilities and school readiness. However relatively little is known about adult and child speech in childcare settings, in which approximately 30% of Am...

The relationship between time and the number of vocalizations children heard from their peers (log per hour averages). Error bands represent standard error of the mean. Each point represents 1 recording day for 1 child. (PDF)

The relationship between children’s vocalizations and conversational turns (A) and peer vocalizations (B). All vocalizations and turn-taking values are log per hour averages. Error bands represent standard error of the mean. Each point represents 1 recording day for 1 child. (PDF)

Discrete emotion theories emphasize the modularity of facial expressions, while functionalist theories suggest that a single facial action may have a common meaning across expressions. Smiles involving the Duchenne marker, eye constriction causing crow’s feet, are perceived as intensely positive and sincere. To test whether the Duchenne marker is a...

A growing number of social scientists have turned to differential equations as a tool for capturing the dynamic interdependence among a system of variables. Current tools for fitting differential equation models do not provide a straightforward mechanism for diagnosing evidence for qualitative shifts in dynamics, nor do they provide ways of identif...

Background Deficits in motor movement in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have typically been characterized qualitatively by human observers. Although clinicians have noted the importance of atypical head positioning (e.g. social peering and repetitive head banging) when diagnosing children with ASD, a quantitative understanding of head...