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Klin A, Lin DJ, Gorrindo P, Ramsay G, Jones W. Two-year-olds with autism orient to non-social contingencies rather than biological motion. Nature 459: 257-261
Abstract
Typically developing human infants preferentially attend to biological motion within the first days of life. This ability is highly conserved across species and is believed to be critical for filial attachment and for detection of predators. The neural underpinnings of biological motion perception are overlapping with brain regions involved in perception of basic social signals such as facial expression and gaze direction, and preferential attention to biological motion is seen as a precursor to the capacity for attributing intentions to others. However, in a serendipitous observation, we recently found that an infant with autism failed to recognize point-light displays of biological motion, but was instead highly sensitive to the presence of a non-social, physical contingency that occurred within the stimuli by chance. This observation raised the possibility that perception of biological motion may be altered in children with autism from a very early age, with cascading consequences for both social development and the lifelong impairments in social interaction that are a hallmark of autism spectrum disorders. Here we show that two-year-olds with autism fail to orient towards point-light displays of biological motion, and their viewing behaviour when watching these point-light displays can be explained instead as a response to non-social, physical contingencies--physical contingencies that are disregarded by control children. This observation has far-reaching implications for understanding the altered neurodevelopmental trajectory of brain specialization in autism.
Supplementary resources (2)
Data
March 2009
Data
March 2009
... Although early signs of ASD may begin to appear by age six months, reliable individually predictive diagnostic indicators during the first year of life have yet to be established, and the median age at diagnosis is 49 months in the US [2,7]. Early autism identification and a deeper understanding of the physiological mechanisms contributing to ASD will inform early interventions that may reduce impairments, enhance social skills development, increase independence, and improve academic success [8][9][10]. Brain-based biomarkers identified through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) may point to region-specific and network-level mechanisms that underlie behavioral variation in autism and may facilitate clinical subtyping, early diagnosis, and track response to interventions [9,10]. ...
... Early autism identification and a deeper understanding of the physiological mechanisms contributing to ASD will inform early interventions that may reduce impairments, enhance social skills development, increase independence, and improve academic success [8][9][10]. Brain-based biomarkers identified through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) may point to region-specific and network-level mechanisms that underlie behavioral variation in autism and may facilitate clinical subtyping, early diagnosis, and track response to interventions [9,10]. However, the MRI environment can prove intolerable for many children due to noise, claustrophobia, and the need to lie supine and still [11]. ...
... Biological motion perception (BMP) is an evolutionarily conserved process [32][33][34][35] that plays a crucial role in filial attachment, predator detection, and social development [36,37], whose difference has been implicated in ASD [9,26]. While typically developing infants display a strong preference for viewing coherent point-light displays of biological motion over scrambled or inverted point-light displays [38,39]-a preference that emerges rapidly over the first two years of life [38] -infants and toddlers who later receive an ASD diagnosis often do not exhibit this preference [9,40,41]. ...
Background
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental disorder defined by social communication deficits plus repetitive behaviors and restricted interests, currently affects 1/36 children in the general population. Recent advances in functional brain imaging show promise to provide useful biomarkers of ASD diagnostic likelihood, behavioral trait severity, and even response to therapeutic intervention. However, current gold-standard neuroimaging methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI) are limited in naturalistic studies of brain function underlying ASD-associated behaviors due to the constrained imaging environment. Compared to fMRI, high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT), a non-invasive and minimally constraining optical neuroimaging modality, can overcome these limitations. Herein, we aimed to establish HD-DOT to evaluate brain function in autistic and non-autistic school-age children as they performed a biological motion perception task previously shown to yield results related to both ASD diagnosis and behavioral traits.
Methods
We used HD-DOT to image brain function in 46 ASD school-age participants and 49 non-autistic individuals (NAI) as they viewed dynamic point-light displays of coherent biological and scrambled motion. We assessed group-level cortical brain function with statistical parametric mapping. Additionally, we tested for brain-behavior associations with dimensional metrics of autism traits, as measured with the Social Responsiveness Scale-2, with hierarchical regression models.
Results
We found that NAI participants presented stronger brain activity contrast (coherent > scrambled) than ASD children in cortical regions related to visual, motor, and social processing. Additionally, regression models revealed multiple cortical regions in autistic participants where brain function is significantly associated with dimensional measures of ASD traits.
Limitations
Optical imaging methods are limited in depth sensitivity and so cannot measure brain activity within deep subcortical regions. However, the field of view of this HD-DOT system includes multiple brain regions previously implicated in both task-based and task-free studies on autism.
Conclusions
This study demonstrates that HD-DOT is sensitive to brain function that both differentiates between NAI and ASD groups and correlates with dimensional measures of ASD traits. These findings establish HD-DOT as an effective tool for investigating brain function in autistic and non-autistic children. Moreover, this study established neural correlates related to biological motion perception and its association with dimensional measures of ASD traits.
... This study opened different research questions which are still under investigation. First, researchers investigated whether low attention towards social stimuli was generally present in the ASD population at various ages (e.g., [8,16]) and also whether it was accompanied by a heightened preference for nonsocial stimuli (e.g., [17,18]). Finally, different studies tried to determine the presence of a causal link between these two behaviours. ...
... Nakano and colleagues [17] found that, during the observation of video scenes, children with ASD compared to typical controls were significantly more attracted by strings of letters appearing on the bottom of the screen than by a little girl appearing on the above part of the screen. Preferential looking paradigms, in which paired social and non-social stimuli are displayed side by side, were used with toddlers and infants in several studies [18,[22][23][24] and provided results supporting the preference for non-social stimuli over a variety of social stimuli in very young children with ASD. ...
... Klin and colleagues [18] used a preferential looking paradigm with point light displays. They found that two-years-old toddlers with ASD tended to look more at parts of the scene characterized by high levels of non-social audiovisual synchrony rather than showing a preference for the display of human biological motion, like matched TD controls did. ...
Different dimensions of visual attention to social (human faces) and non-social stimuli (objects) were assessed in 19 preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and 19 typically developing (TD) age, gender, and IQ-matched controls through an original paired preference eye-tracking paradigm. The present study found a significantly reduced attentional bias toward human faces in children with ASD compared to TD controls. The analysis of the total fixation time showed a significantly reduced preference for faces in children with ASD compared to TD children. Moreover, while TD children showed a significant preference for the face over the object, children in the ASD group observed the two paired pictures for a similar amount of time, thus showing no preference. Besides, children with ASD paid significantly more sustained attention to the objects than TD children. Children in the TD group paid greater sustained attention to the faces over the objects, while children in the ASD group did not differentiate between objects and faces. Finally, an age effect was found in ASD, as younger children in the group tended to prefer objects and to show more sustained attention towards them. Overall, these findings add to the literature on anomalies in attention toward social and non-social stimuli in young children with ASD compared to their TD counterparts. These results are discussed in the light of previous studies and suggest possible directions for future research.
... Specifically, Elsabbagh et al., (2013) used a face pop-out task and demonstrated a robust orienting response in 6-to 10-month-old infants at EL for ASD. However, as children with ASD grow older, their orienting to social stimuli starts to diverge from those of typically developing children, possibly reflecting the cascading effects of early alterations on later social performance (Annaz et al., 2012;Dawson et al., 2004;Falck-Ytter et al., 2013;Klin et al., 2009). ...
... Consistent with our expectation, this association suggests that individual differences in mutual gaze could be an early indicator or antecedent of social orienting difficulties in this group (Annaz et al., 2012;Falck-Ytter et al., 2013;Klin et al., 2009). Similarly, De Klerk et al. (2014 found that infants who looked more at faces at 7 months performed worse on face recognition tasks in toddlerhood. ...
... The research on whether children and adolescents with ASD diagnosis have difficulty in perceiving BM has also reported mixed results. Some studies reported that young autistic children exhibited less spontaneous looking to upright BM PLDs paired with its scrambled version or a non-biological object motion (Annaz et al., 2012;Hsiung et al., 2019;Klin et al., 2009;Klin & Jones, 2008;Wang et al., 2015) and were slower and less accurate in recognizing PLDs portraying human actions (Wang et al., 2015). Other studies, however, supported only selective or no impairment at all of BM perception in autistic children. ...
... This indicates that the overt visual attention to the biological motion stimuli differed between groups and was truly specific to the attention allocated to BM. These results are in line with previous studies showing that autistic people exhibit less visual preference for BM stimuli (Annaz et al., 2012;Klin et al., 2009;Wang et al., 2015). Looking beyond the consideration of attention to BM as a differentiating factor between autistic and NT individuals, BM holds potential as an indicator or experimental biomarker for assessing changes in response to intervention in ASD. ...
There has been a lot of controversy regarding mirror neuron function in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in particular during the observation of biological motions (BM). Here, we directly explored the link between visual attention and brain activity in terms of mu suppression, by simultaneously recording eye‐tracking and EEGs during BM tasks. Nineteen autistic children (15 boys, mean age = 11.57 ± 4.28 years) and 19 age‐matched neurotypical (NT) children (15 boys, mean age = 11.68 ± 5.22 years) participated in the study. Each participant's eye movement and EEG were simultaneously recorded while watching four BM stimuli (walking, cartwheeling, free‐throwing and underarm throwing) and a scrambled condition. Mu (8–13 Hz) suppression index (SI) for central regions was calculated. Fixation counts and percent of fixation time were calculated as indices of eye movements. EEG results revealed significant mu suppressions in the central region in both groups for all BM actions. Eye‐tracking results showed that NT children had greater fixation counts and a higher percentage of fixation time than autistic children, indicating greater overall visual attention to BM. Notably, correlational analyses for both groups further revealed that individuals' fixation time and fixation counts were negatively correlated with the mu suppression index for all actions, indicating a strong association between visual attention and mu SI in the central region. Our findings suggest a critical role of visual attention in interpreting mu suppression during action perception in autism.
... One early emerging functional brain network 19 of particular interest in understanding ASD symptomatology is the Salience Network (SN) 20 , which is believed to be integral in guiding attention to the most salient interoceptive and exteroceptive stimuli 20,21 . Altered Salience Network connectivity can discriminate children with ASD from neurotypical controls with high classification accuracy 22 , and is associated with symptoms of restrictive/repetitive behaviors 22 , including atypical sensory processing 23 , which may highlight a potential neural mechanism underlying increased perceived salience of low-level, perceptual contingencies in the environment at the expense of higher-level social information 24 . The Salience Network has been identified in neonates 19,25,26 , and while not yet fully mature 19 , even in its early forms, it is thought to play a key role in influencing early brain development 27 . ...
... Faces represent a highly salient class of stimuli for typically-developing infants 29 and normative patterns of early Salience Network connectivity may support the initial attentional bias toward faces as well as subsequent developmental increases in visual attention to faces in the first year 30 . Conversely, early disruptions in Salience Network connectivity may iteratively derail processes that typically reinforce the perceived salience of faces 31 by conferring heightened salience to lower-level non-social stimuli 24 . Indeed, initial overt symptom-based markers of ASD suggest deviations in processes that typically guide social communicative development, including attention to faces 5 and speech. ...
Converging evidence implicates disrupted brain connectivity in autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, the mechanisms linking altered connectivity early in development to the emergence of ASD symptomatology remain poorly understood. Here we examined whether atypicalities in the Salience Network – an early-emerging neural network involved in orienting attention to the most salient aspects of one’s internal and external environment – may predict the development of ASD symptoms such as reduced social attention and atypical sensory processing. Six-week-old infants at high likelihood of developing ASD based on family history exhibited stronger Salience Network connectivity with sensorimotor regions; infants at typical likelihood of developing ASD demonstrated stronger Salience Network connectivity with prefrontal regions involved in social attention. Infants with higher connectivity with sensorimotor regions had lower connectivity with prefrontal regions, suggesting a direct tradeoff between attention to basic sensory versus socially-relevant information. Early alterations in Salience Network connectivity predicted subsequent ASD symptomatology, providing a plausible mechanistic account for the unfolding of atypical developmental trajectories associated with vulnerability to ASD.
... First, under the integrated-system hypothesis where gestures and speech constitute a unified communicative and cognitive system (e.g., Goldin-Meadow, 2003;Kendon, 2000;McNeill, 1992), difficulties in gesture comprehension may be linked to challenges with language processing (e.g., Goldin-Meadow & Alibali, 2013;Kelly et al., 2010). Second, difficulties with co-speech gestures might stem from reduced attention and appetence towards socio-communicative cues, widely documented in autism (e.g., Chevallier et al., 2012;Klin et al., 2009). Third, challenges may relate to a deficit in multimodal integration of speech and gesture, as suggested by neuroimaging studies (e.g., Hubbard et al., 2012), as well as by the observation that challenges in understanding gesture emerge when these are presented simultaneously with speech in autistic adolescents (Silverman et al., 2010). ...
Co-speech gestures accompany or replace speech in communication. Studies investigating how autistic children understand them are scarce and inconsistent and often focus on decontextualized, iconic gestures. This study compared 73 three- to twelve-year-old autistic children with 73 neurotypical peers matched on age, non-verbal IQ, and morphosyntax. Specifically, we examined (1) their ability to understand deictic (i.e., pointing ), iconic (e.g., gesturing ball ), and conventional (e.g., gesturing hello ) speechless video-taped gestures following verbal information in a narrative and (2) the impact of linguistic (e.g., vocabulary, morphosyntax) and cognitive factors (i.e., working memory) on their performance, to infer on the underlying mechanisms involved. Autistic children displayed overall good performance in gesture comprehension, although a small but significant difference advantage was observed in neurotypical children. Findings suggest that combining speech and gesture sequentially may be relatively spared in autism and might represent a way to alleviate the demand for simultaneous cross-modal processing.
... It has been demonstrated that facial emotional expressions can be recognized from PLDs [33][34][35] and that such stimuli can reliably activate brain regions associated with face processing, such as the fusiform face area (FFA) [36]. Furthermore, neurotypical children exhibit visual preference for PLDs depicting biological motion when compared with autistic children [37,38], and high autistic traits relate to impaired emotion recognition from facial PLDs [39]. Importantly, some researchers have connected deficits in emotion recognition to social motivation and reward processing [40]. ...
A number of studies have linked autistic traits to difficulties in learning from social (versus non-social) stimuli. However, these stimuli are often difficult to match on low-level visual properties, which is especially important given the impact of autistic traits on sensory processing. Additionally, studies often fail to account for dissociable aspects of the learning process in the specification of model parameters (learning rates and reward sensitivity). Here, we investigate whether learning deficits in individuals with high autistic traits exhibit deficits when learning from facial point-light displays (PLDs) depicting emotional expressions. Social and non-social stimuli were created from random arrangements of the same number of point-lights and carefully matched on low-level visual properties. Neurotypical participants (N = 63) were assessed using the autism spectrum quotient (AQ) and completed a total of 96 trials in a reinforcement learning task. Although linear multi-level modelling did not indicate learning deficits, pre-registered computational modelling using a Rescorla–Wagner framework revealed that higher autistic traits were associated with reduced reward sensitivity in the win domain, demonstrating an attenuated response to received feedback during learning. These findings suggest that autistic traits can significantly impact learning from PLD feedback beyond a general deficit in learning rates.
... Eyetracking is a technique that enables the precise measurement of visual attention in infancy through the use of infrared light to detect the direction of gaze. A long history of infant eyetracking and gaze coding research has shown that individual differences in infant attention can relate to later cognition [18,79,80], and ASD and ADHD-related traits [25,52,60]. Models of infant visual attention distinguish between exogenous orienting (shifting from one spatial location to another in response to an external cue) and endogenous control (an internallydriven shift from one location to another; [19]). ...
Background
Neurofibromatosis Type 1 is a genetic condition diagnosed in infancy that substantially increases the likelihood of a child experiencing cognitive and developmental difficulties, including Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Children with NF1 show clear differences in attention, but whether these differences emerge in early development and how they relate to broader difficulties with cognitive and learning skills is unclear. To address this question requires longitudinal prospective studies from infancy, where the relation between domains of visual attention (including exogenous and endogenous shifting) and cognitive development can be mapped over time.
Methods
We report data from 28 infants with NF1 tested longitudinally at 5, 10 and 14 months compared to cohorts of 29 typical likelihood infants (with no history of NF1 or ASD and/or ADHD), and 123 infants with a family history of ASD and/or ADHD. We used an eyetracking battery to measure both exogenous and endogenous control of visual attention.
Results
Infants with NF1 demonstrated intact social orienting, but slower development of endogenous visual foraging. This slower development presented as prolonged engagement with a salient stimulus in a static display relative to typically developing infants. In terms of exogenous attention shifting, NF1 infants showed faster saccadic reaction times than typical likelihood infants. However, the NF1 group demonstrated a slower developmental improvement from 5 to 14 months of age. Individual differences in foraging and saccade times were concurrently related to visual reception abilities within the full infant cohort (NF1, typical likelihood and those with a family history of ASD/ADHD).
Conclusions
Our results provide preliminary evidence that alterations in saccadic reaction time and visual foraging may contribute to learning difficulties in infants with NF1.
... Unlike typically developing (TD) children, children with ASD do not show this primary interest in speech [4][5][6][7]. Instead, they tend to engage in slow and repetitive visual exploration of their environment, eventually leading to atypical interests [8][9][10][11][12][13]. This focus on visual aspects of their surroundings allows ASD children to explore the world at their own pace and avoid highly dynamic stimuli such as speech and biological motion [14][15][16], which are often perceived as overwhelming [17,18]. ...
Background
Children with Autism Spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit communication difficulties that may stem from basic auditory temporal integration impairment but also be aggravated by an audio-visual integration deficit, resulting in a lack of interest in face-to-face communication. This study addresses whether speech processing anomalies in young autistic children (mean age 3.09-year-old) are associated with alterations of audio-visual temporal integration.
Methods
We used high-density electroencephalography (HD-EEG) and eye tracking to record brain activity and gaze patterns in 31 children with ASD (6 females) and 33 typically developing (TD) children (11 females), while they watched cartoon videos. Neural responses to temporal audio-visual stimuli were analyzed using Temporal Response Functions model and phase analyses for audiovisual temporal coordination.
Results
The reconstructability of speech signals from auditory responses was reduced in children with ASD compared to TD, but despite more restricted gaze patterns in ASD it was similar for visual responses in both groups. Speech reception was most strongly affected when visual speech information was also present, an interference that was not seen in TD children. These differences were associated with a broader phase angle distribution (exceeding pi/2) in the EEG theta range in children with ASD, signaling reduced reliability of audio-visual temporal alignment.
Conclusion
These findings show that speech processing anomalies in ASD do not stand alone and that they are associated already at a very early development stage with audio-visual imbalance with poor auditory response encoding and disrupted audio-visual temporal coordination.
... We propose that potential difficulties in temporal synchrony detection and selective attention may start as domain-general, but have greater cascading effects on infant siblings' attunement to their social environment due to the complex nature of these events, such as audiovisual speech (see Figure 1 for an overview of our proposal). Indeed, autistic children show more pronounced difficulties in detecting temporal asynchronies in social versus non-social events (Falck-Ytter et al., 2013;Klin et al., 2009). However, it remains unclear whether this asymmetry extends to infant siblings as a whole and, if so, when it emerges (possibly between 4 and 24 months, as suggested by Suri et al., 2023). ...
Detecting temporal synchrony in audiovisual speech in infancy is fundamental for socio-communicative development, especially for language acquisition. Autism is an early-onset and highly heritable neurodevelopmental condition often associated with language difficulties that usually extend to infants with an elevated likelihood of autism. Early susceptibilities in still unclear basic mechanisms may underlie these difficulties. Here, we discuss why sensitivity to temporal synchrony in audiovisual speech should be investigated in infants with an elevated likelihood of autism as a candidate mechanism underlying language difficulties. We then review direct and indirect eye-tracking evidence. Although scarce, some studies suggest that detection of temporal synchrony in audiovisual speech may be reduced in infant siblings (but evidence is mixed); however, this does not seem to account for language difficulties. Instead, a lack of relationship between selective attention to the articulating mouth and language development may be a plausible candidate mechanism. However, longitudinal studies tracking both sensitivity to temporal synchrony and selective attention to talking faces in the first year are needed for further clarification. Our discussion highlights gaps in the literature, future research directions and implications for domain-general approaches to the emergence of autism.
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... Excessive screen time appears to Fig. 3 Scatterplots of associations between screen time at 18 months and a autism symptoms and b ADHD symptoms at 3-5 years negatively impact self-regulation, particularly in preschool aged children [9], and may exacerbate existing disruptive behaviors, further increasing the likelihood of more screen exposure. Moreover, autistic children show less interest in the social aspects of their environment [11,28,41], and both children with autism and ADHD have more difficulty regulating attentional engagement/disengagement [5,50,63]. These tendencies may disadvantage children from attending to cues that facilitate social interaction and may be exacerbated by screen time that reinforces inherent preferences for non-socially contingent audiovisual stimulation. ...
Greater screen time is associated with increased symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (autism), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and lower scores on measures of development in preschool-aged community samples. In the current longitudinal study, we examined screen time differences at 18 months of age based on clinically-defined outcomes (i.e., Autism, ADHD Concerns, Comparison) determined at age 3–5 years in a genetically-enriched sample based on family history, along with prospective associations between toddler screen time and preschool autism/ADHD symptoms and developmental achievement. Participants (n = 82) included children at high and low familial likelihood for autism and ADHD. Children with Autism and ADHD Concerns outcomes experienced significantly more screen exposure at 18 months than children without autism or elevated symptoms of ADHD. Greater screen time at 18 months was also associated with preschool symptoms of autism and ADHD and lower developmental achievement across the sample. Preschoolers with neurodevelopmental challenges experienced more screen exposure earlier in development than same-age peers, increasing potential for negative developmental impacts.
... Up to 60% of children with ASD receive a language disorder diagnosis, and up to 30% plateau at little or no spoken language (e.g., Anderson et al. 2007;Tager-Flusberg and Kasari 2013;Thurm et al. 2015). In ASD, difficulties in communication and interaction have been linked to atypical processing of social information in both the auditory and visual modalities (Dawson et al. 1998(Dawson et al. , 2004Klin et al. 2009; for a review, see Chevallier et al. 2012). Some children and adults with ASD have been shown to ignore human vocalizations in their environment but respond to non-vocal stimuli (Klin 1991;Kuhl et al. 2005). ...
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit greater sensitivity to non‐speech sounds, reduced sensitivity to speech, and increased variability in cortical activity during auditory speech processing. We assessed differences in cortical responses and variability in early and later processing stages of auditory speech versus non‐speech sounds in typically developing (TD) children and children with ASD. Twenty‐eight 4‐ to 9‐year‐old children (14 ASDs) listened to speech and non‐speech sounds during an electroencephalography session. We measured peak amplitudes for early (P2) and later (P3a) stages of auditory processing and inter‐trial theta phase coherence as a marker of cortical variability. TD children were more sensitive to speech sounds during early and later processing stages than ASD children, reflected in larger P2 and P3a amplitudes. Individually, twice as many TD children showed reliable differentiation between speech and non‐speech sounds compared to children with ASD. Children with ASD showed greater intra‐individual variability in theta responses to speech sounds during early and later processing stages. Children with ASD show atypical auditory processing of fundamental speech sounds, perhaps due to reduced and more variable cortical activation. These atypicalities in the consistency of cortical responses to fundamental speech features may impact the development of cortical networks and have downstream effects on more complex forms of language processing.
... The Enactive Mind (EM) approach 14 views cognition as bodily experiences from an organism's adaptive actions on salient environmental aspects. Reduced attention to social stimuli [14][15][16] and altered perception of social salience may partially explain the different acquisition of embodied social cognition in autism. Another framework, that may be relevant to VFs expression and processing, suggests that self/other-awareness and children's emotional relationships with embodied persons are foundational for understanding social meanings in others' actions 17 . ...
Vitality Forms (VFs) constitute the dynamic essence of human actions, providing insights into how individuals engage in activities. The ability to perceive and express VFs during interpersonal interactions is pivotal for understanding others’ intentions, behaviors, and fostering effective social communication. Despite their ubiquity in all actions, research exploring the role of VFs in neurodivergent conditions related to social and communicative skills, particularly in autism, remains limited. This study aims to investigate the expression of different VFs during the execution of both social and non-social actions in children with an Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) in comparison to neurotypical children (NT). ASC children and NT children were asked to move a small bottle either towards a target point (non-social context) or moving it towards a receiver (social context) with different VFs specifically neutral, gentle, or rude. Videotaped tasks were subsequently analyzed to study kinematic parameters characterizing VFs. Our results highlighted three main findings: (1) overall, ASC children are able to tune the motor profile of their actions, effectively conveying both gentle and rude VFs; (2) distinct kinematic parameters in the execution of VFs are able to distinguish autistic children from NT children; (3) the social context significantly influences the child’s ability to express positive and negative VFs in autism. Taken together, these findings provide new insights to understand how VFs contribute to the complex dynamics of social communication in neurodivergent autistic children, providing a valuable contribution for future interventions and support strategies.
... Notably, the happy over sad dilation effect was negatively correlated with autistic traits: individuals with greater autistic tendencies showed decreased sensitivities to emotions in BM. In fact, the perception of BM has long been considered an important hallmark of social cognition, and abundant studies reported that individuals with social cognitive deficits (e.g., autism spectrum disorder, ASD) were impaired in BM perception (Blake et al., 2003;Freitag et al., 2008;Klin et al., 2009;Nackaerts et al., 2012). More recently, it has been pointed out that the extraction of more complex social information (e.g., emotions, intentions) from BM, as compared to basic BM recognitions, could be more effective in detecting ASDs (Federici et al., 2020;Koldewyn et al., 2010;Parron et al., 2008;Todorova et al., 2019). ...
Perceiving emotions from the movements of other biological entities is critical for human survival and interpersonal interactions. Here, we report that emotional information conveyed by point-light biological motion (BM) triggered automatic physiological responses as reflected in pupil size. Specifically, happy BM evoked larger pupil size than neutral and sad BM, while sad BM induced a smaller pupil response than neutral BM. Moreover, this happy over sad pupil dilation effect is negatively correlated with individual autistic traits. Notably, emotional BM with only local motion features retained could also exert modulations on pupils. Compared with intact BM, both happy and sad local BM evoked stronger pupil responses than neutral local BM starting from an earlier time point, with no difference between the happy and sad conditions. These results revealed a fine-grained pupil-related emotional modulation induced by intact BM and a coarse but rapid modulation by local BM, demonstrating multi-level processing of emotions in life motion signals. Taken together, our findings shed new light on BM emotion processing, and highlight the potential of utilizing the emotion-modulated pupil response to facilitate the diagnosis of social cognitive disorders.
... Multiple meta-analytic studies [1,36] suggest that differences in social attention are not modulated by IQ matching between the NT and ASC groups and remain stable across IQ differences between groups [37]. Furthermore, various studies [38][39][40] involving control groups with developmentally delayed individuals showed that individuals with autism exhibit reduced social attention compared with both developmentally delayed and NT groups. These findings highlight the importance of addressing social attention differences in ASC, regardless of intellectual ability. ...
Background
Cross-neurotype differences in social communication patterns contribute to high unemployment rates among adults with autism. Adults with autism can be unsuccessful in job searches or terminated from employment due to mismatches between their social attention behaviors and society’s expectations on workplace communication.
Objective
We propose a behavioral intervention concerning distribution of attention in triadic (three-way) conversations. Specifically, the objective is to determine whether providing personalized feedback to each individual with autism based on an analysis of their attention distribution behavior during an initial conversation session would cause them to modify their orientation behavior in a subsequent conversation session.
Methods
Our system uses an unobtrusive head orientation estimation model to track the focus of attention of each individual. Head orientation sequences from a conversation session are analyzed based on five statistical domains (eg, maximum exclusion duration and average contact duration) representing different types of attention distribution behavior. An intervention is provided to a participant if they exceeded the nonautistic average for that behavior by at least 2 SDs. The intervention uses data analysis and video modeling along with a constructive discussion about the targeted behaviors. Twenty-four individuals with autism with no intellectual disabilities participated in the study. The participants were divided into test and control groups of 12 participants each.
Results
Based on their attention distribution behavior in the initial conversation session, 11 of the 12 participants in the test group received an intervention in at least one domain. Of the 11 participants who received the intervention, 10 showed improvement in at least one domain on which they received feedback. Independent t tests for larger test groups (df>15) confirmed that the group improvements are statistically significant compared with the corresponding controls (P<.05). Crawford-Howell t tests confirmed that 78% of the interventions resulted in significant improvements when compared individually against corresponding controls (P<.05). Additional t tests comparing the first conversation sessions of the test and control groups and comparing the first and second conversation sessions of the control group resulted in nonsignificant differences, pointing to the intervention being the main effect behind the behavioral changes displayed by the test group, as opposed to confounding effects or group differences.
Conclusions
Our proposed behavioral intervention offers a useful framework for practicing social attention behavior in multiparty conversations that are common in social and professional settings.
... Eye tracking, a non-invasive and straightforward measurement technique, has garnered the attention of scientists in recent years (8)(9)(10)(11). The use of eye tracking in ASD research is justified by the correlation between ASD and different attention patterns, which differ from those seen in typical development (12)(13)(14)(15). Hence, the use of eye tracking based system to quantify eye activities and gaze designs should assist in understanding the aberrant behavior associated with persons diagnosed with ASD, as well as distinguishing individuals with ASD from typically developing (TD) individuals. ...
Timely and unbiased evaluation of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is essential for providing lasting benefits to affected individuals. However, conventional ASD assessment heavily relies on subjective criteria, lacking objectivity. Recent advancements propose the integration of modern processes, including artificial intelligence-based eye-tracking technology, for early ASD assessment. Nonetheless, the current diagnostic procedures for ASD often involve specialized investigations that are both time-consuming and costly, heavily reliant on the proficiency of specialists and employed techniques. To address the pressing need for prompt, efficient, and precise ASD diagnosis, an exploration of sophisticated intelligent techniques capable of automating disease categorization was presented. This study has utilized a freely accessible dataset comprising 547 eye-tracking systems that can be used to scan pathways obtained from 328 characteristically emerging children and 219 children with autism. To counter overfitting, state-of-the-art image resampling approaches to expand the training dataset were employed. Leveraging deep learning algorithms, specifically MobileNet, VGG19, DenseNet169, and a hybrid of MobileNet-VGG19, automated classifiers, that hold promise for enhancing diagnostic precision and effectiveness, was developed. The MobileNet model demonstrated superior performance compared to existing systems, achieving an impressive accuracy of 100%, while the VGG19 model achieved 92% accuracy. These findings demonstrate the potential of eye-tracking data to aid physicians in efficiently and accurately screening for autism. Moreover, the reported results suggest that deep learning approaches outperform existing event detection algorithms, achieving a similar level of accuracy as manual coding. Users and healthcare professionals can utilize these classifiers to enhance the accuracy rate of ASD diagnosis. The development of these automated classifiers based on deep learning algorithms holds promise for enhancing the diagnostic precision and effectiveness of ASD assessment, addressing the pressing need for prompt, efficient, and precise ASD diagnosis.
... Importantly, epigenetic investigations have revealed an abnormal aging trajectory in the cerebellum of individuals with both ASD and schizophrenia. This finding may explain the shared anomalies among ASD and schizophrenia and their common alterations in social cognition, which could represent the neurophysiological underpinnings of their deficits in the perception of biological movements (Kim et al., 2005;Klin et al., 2009;Koldewyn et al., 2010;Liu et al., 2023). As suggested by Sokolov et al., these data are also supported by the altered functional connections between the right STS and the left cerebellar lobule Crus I, which are common to both pathologies (Kaiser et al., 2010;Sokolov et al., 2012). ...
Mirror neurons show activity during both the execution (AE) and observation of actions (AO). The Mirror Neuron System (MNS) could be involved during motor imagery (MI) as well. Extensive research suggests that the cerebellum is interconnected with the MNS and may be critically involved in its activities. We gathered evidence on the cerebellum's role in MNS functions, both theoretically and experimentally. Evidence shows that the cerebellum plays a major role during AO and MI and that its lesions impair MNS functions likely because, by modulating the activity of cortical inhibitory interneurons with mirror properties, the cerebellum may contribute to visuomotor matching, which is fundamental for shaping mirror properties. Indeed, the cerebellum may strengthen sensory-motor patterns that minimise the discrepancy between predicted and actual outcome, both during AE and AO. Furthermore, through its connections with the hippocampus, the cerebellum might be involved in internal simulations of motor programs during MI. Finally, as cerebellar neuromodulation might improve its impact on MNS activity, we explored its potential neurophysiological and neurorehabilitation implications.
... Johansson (Johansson 1973) first observed that an animation sequence, consisting of just a few strategically positioned points of light on the main joints, suffices to create the impression of an organism engaged in coordinated activity, such as walking. This ability to perceive biological motion has been extensively investigated in several vertebrate species (Herman et al. 1990;Blake 1993;Oram and Perrett 1994;Dittrich et al. 1998;Regolin et al. 2000;Tomonaga 2001;Vallortigara et al. 2005;Vallortigara and Regolin 2006;Parron et al. 2007;MacKinnon et al. 2010;Vangeneugden et al. 2010;Jastorff et al. 2012;Nakayasu and Watanabe 2013;Schluessel et al. 2015;Kovács et al. 2016;Atsumi et al. 2018;Ishikawa et al. 2018;Lorenzi and Vallortigara 2021), it is present at the onset of life (Vallortigara et al. 2005;Simion et al. 2008: 20) and seems to be impaired in neurodevelopmental disorders affecting social cognition such as autism (Klin et al. 2009;Di Giorgio et al. 2016, 2021b. ...
Biological motion, the typical movement of vertebrates, is perceptually salient for many animal species. Newly hatched domestic chicks and human newborns show a spontaneous preference for simple biological motion stimuli (point-light displays) at birth prior to any visual learning. Despite evidence of such preference at birth, neural studies performed so far have focused on a specialized neural network involving primarily cortical areas. Here, we presented newly hatched visually naïve domestic chicks to either biological or rigid motion stimuli and measured for the first time their brain activation. Immediate Early Gene (c-Fos) expression revealed selective activation in the preoptic area of the hypothalamus and the nucleus taeniae of the amygdala. These results suggest that subpallial/subcortical regions play a crucial role in biological motion perception at hatching, paving the way for future studies on adult animals, including humans.
... Within the context of neurodevelopmental conditions like autism spectrum disorder (subsequently referred to as autism), it has been proposed that initially subtle differences in infant social ability (e.g. differences in infant social signalling [10,11] or in the infant's perceived salience of social and non-social information [12][13][14][15][16][17]) can change the experiential environment elicited by the infant well before diagnostic traits or features of autism are observed [5,18]. These changes would accrue through subsequent development, contributing to further divergences in learning experiences and social ability [18]. ...
As infants develop, caregivers adjust their behaviour to scaffold their infant’s emerging skills, such that changes in infants’ social abilities are expected to elicit changes in caregiver behaviour. We examined whether changes in the probability of infant-directed caregiving behaviour—specifically, greeting, a ubiquitous signal used by caregivers to initiate reciprocal interactions—differ between infant–caregiver dyads with an infant later diagnosed with autism and dyads with a neurotypically developing infant during infants’ first 6 months. Using longitudinal data from 163 dyads, we found that caregivers in autism dyads (n = 40) used greeting less and at later infant ages than caregivers with a neurotypically developing infant (neurotypical dyads, n = 83). Caregivers in dyads with infants at elevated familial genetic likelihood for autism who did not receive an autism diagnosis (EL-non-autism dyads, n = 40) showed no differences in greeting compared with neurotypical dyads. Socioeconomic status partially mediated the difference between autism and neurotypical dyads. These findings show that autism and socioeconomic status were associated with the mutually adapted dynamics of dyadic interaction beginning in the first postnatal weeks. Importantly, differences in caregiver greeting observed in autism dyads are not interpreted as suboptimal behaviour from caregivers but rather indicate how early emerging social differences related to autism, years before overt features are present, may alter social learning opportunities elicited by the infant.
... First, it allows the visible and invisible stimuli to be presented to both eyes for exactly the same duration. More importantly, it does not involve any additional mask or noise stimulus that might substantially distract the attention of individuals with ASD or high autistic traits [66,67]. Hence, it offers a suitable means to explore the attentional orienting in both TD and ASD participants. ...
Typically developing (TD) individuals can readily orient attention according to others’ eye-gaze direction, an ability known as social attention, which involves both innate and acquired components. To distinguish between these two components, we used a critical flicker fusion technique to render gaze cues invisible to participants, thereby largely reducing influences from consciously acquired strategies. Results revealed that both visible and invisible gaze cues could trigger attentional orienting in TD adults (aged 20 to 30 years) and children (aged 6 to 12 years). Intriguingly, only the ability to involuntarily respond to invisible gaze cues was negatively correlated with autistic traits among all TD participants. This ability was substantially impaired in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and in children with high autistic traits. No such association or reduction was observed with visible gaze cues. These findings provide compelling evidence for the functional demarcation of conscious and unconscious gaze-triggered attentional orienting that emerges early in life and develops into adulthood, shedding new light on the differentiation of the innate and acquired aspects of social attention. Moreover, they contribute to a comprehensive understanding of social endophenotypes of ASD.
... Mainstream intervention strategies, such as the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) and Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation (JASPER), typically involve intensive joint-interactive activities between clinical personnel and autistic learners with the aim of increasing social motivation and typical social behaviors (Dawson et al., 2010;Kasari et al., 2006). These "social-first" strategies are based on the observation that autistic children exhibit an overt disinterest in social stimuli during their early developmental stages (Jones & Klin, 2013;Klin et al., 2009;Swettenham et al., 1998). These alterations in social attention and the reduction of typical social behaviors in autistic individuals are addressed by social motivation theories. ...
While overt social atypicalities remain a key component of the autistic phenotype, recent reframing of autistic social motivation suggests that these atypicalities do not overlap with their actual level of social engagement. Our study aimed to investigate autistic preschoolers’ visual attention toward social situations with unequal interactive load and determine the potential benefits of parallel competition, a form of lateral tutorship. The study observed 26 autistic preschoolers and 20 typically developing children. First, a gaze-contingent procedure measured visual attention toward videos of parallel competitive play, overtly cooperative play, and a non-social object. Then, a motor task and a cognitive task were conducted, both independently and with a parallel competitor to assess the effect of parallel engagement on children’s performance. Eye-tracking demonstrated autistic children displayed reduced attention toward competition than typically developing children. However, behavioral data revealed the presence of a parallel competitor significantly and similarly improved performance for autistics and typically developing children. These findings suggest a dissociation between social attention and social facilitation in young autistic children, indicating that atypical visual patterns toward social situations do not necessarily preclude them from benefiting from these situations. As such, activities parallel to the child activities, or lateral tutorship, may represent an addition to traditional joint-interactive activities in early education for autistic children.
Lay Abstract
Recent research suggests that we might have underestimated the social motivation of autistic individuals. Autistic children might be engaged in a social situation, even if they seem not to be attending to people in a typical way. Our study investigated how young autistic children behave in a “parallel” situation, which we call “parallel competition,” where people participate in friendly contests side-by-side but without direct interaction. First, we used eye-tracking technology to observe how much autistic children pay attention to two video scenarios: one depicting parallel competition, and the other where individuals play directly with each other. The results showed that autistic children looked less toward the parallel competition video than their typically developing peers. However, when autistic children took part in parallel competitions themselves, playing physical and cognitive games against a teacher, their performance improved relative to playing individually just as much as their typically developing peers. This suggests that even though autistic children pay attention to social events differently, they can still benefit from the presence of others. These findings suggest complementing traditional cooperative activities by incorporating parallel activities into educational programs for young autistic children. By doing so, we can create more inclusive learning environments for these children.
... Moreover, while other behavioural studies suggest autistic people autism may be less sensitive to the social information conveyed in human movement (e.g., emotions, intentions) 49 , we found no evidence associating emerging autism behaviours with gaze to biological motion PLDs in this infant sample. This null finding is consistent with Fujioka et al. 's previous report following Gazefinder eye-tracking assessment with autistic and non-autistic adolescents/adults 18 but contrasts with other studies finding reduced fixation towards similar biological motion PLD stimuli in autistic children aged 2-7 years [50][51][52] . Limited utility of the specific biological motion PLD trials within the Gazefinder 'Scene 1S4' protocol may therefore be suggested for autism-related visual social attention assessment. ...
We tested the potential for Gazefinder eye-tracking to support early autism identification, including feasible use with infants, and preliminary concurrent validity of trial-level gaze data against clinical assessment scores. We embedded the ~ 2-min ‘Scene 1S4’ protocol within a comprehensive clinical assessment for 54 consecutively-referred, clinically-indicated infants (prematurity-corrected age 9–14 months). Alongside % tracking rate as a broad indicator of feasible assessment/data capture, we report infant gaze data to pre-specified regions of interest (ROI) across four trial types and associations with scores on established clinical/behavioural tools. Most infants tolerated Gazefinder eye-tracking well, returning high overall % tracking rate. As a group, infants directed more gaze towards social vs. non-social (or more vs. less socially-salient) ROIs within trials. Behavioural autism features were correlated with increased gaze towards non-social/geometry (vs. social/people) scenes. No associations were found for gaze directed to ROIs within other stimulus types. Notably, there were no associations between developmental/cognitive ability or adaptive behaviour with gaze towards any ROI. Gazefinder assessment seems highly feasible with clinically-indicated infants, and the people vs. geometry stimuli show concurrent predictive validity for behavioural autism features. Aggregating data across the ~ 2-min autism identification protocol might plausibly offer greater utility than stimulus-level analysis alone.
... Experiments investigating the eye movements of toddlers with ASD showed that these toddlers are less likely than TD children to focus on faces (Chawarska et al., 2010;Jones et al., 2008;Ozdemir et al., 2018;Shic et al., 2011). Moreover, various studies indicated reduced preferential attention to social stimuli compared to non-social stimuli across diverse age groups (Campbell et al., 2014;Chawarska et al., 2012;Crawford et al., 2016;Falck-Ytter et al., 2013;Klin et al., 2009;Ozdemir et al., 2022). Numerous studies suggest that ASD is associated with increased visual attention towards objects (Moriuchi et al., 2016;Sabatino, 2013;Sasson & Touchstone, 2014;Turner-Brown et al., 2011). ...
Impairments in joint attention are considered core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and are crucial for early assessment and intervention. However, existing information about visual attention during joint attention and its relation to developmental functioning is limited. The current study investigated the visual attention differences between toddlers with ASD and typically developing (TD) toddlers during single and multiple joint attention cue conditions. This study further examined whether visual attention in joint attention Area of Interests (AOIs) is related to cognitive, language, and motor development in participants. Participants included 56 toddlers with ASD and 56 TD toddlers, aged 18–36 months. A passive viewing paradigm was used to assess participants’ visual attention across four different joint attention conditions. Study results showed that toddlers with ASD displayed limited visual attention towards joint attention AOIs, Target, Face, and Target and Face AOIs, in all conditions. As the joint attention cues increased from Condition 1 to Condition 4, toddlers with ASD showed increased visual attention directed towards the Target AOI over the Face AOI. Moreover, increased visual attention on the joint attention AOIs was associated with improved cognitive and language development in toddlers with ASD. This research broadens our understanding of the positive relationships between visual attention to joint attention AOIs and cognitive as well as language development in toddlers with ASD, suggesting that early interventions targeting joint attention may offer promising pathways for treatment.
... This suggests that at least part of the cortical network may be specific to processing human movement (real and virtual). Moreover, studies using stimuli consisting of point light, allowing the perception of movement without the confusion of form, revealed that children with ASD did not show a preference for biological movements over non-biological movements [116,159]. Lastly, by examining ASD people's brain activation while they watched pictures of faces, Whyte et al. [146] found a hypo-activation of the face processing network for human faces but not for animal faces. Therefore, the brain networks and processes engaged in the perception of human or animal stimuli do not seem to be the same. ...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by interaction and communication differences, entailing visual attention skill specificities. Interactions with animals, such as in animal-assisted interventions or with service dogs, have been shown to be beneficial for individuals with ASD. While interacting with humans poses challenges for them, engaging with animals appears to be different. One hypothesis suggests that differences between individuals with ASD’s visual attention to humans and to animals may contribute to these interaction differences. We propose a scoping review of the research on the visual attention to animals of youths with ASD. The objective is to review the methodologies and tools used to explore such questions, to summarize the main results, to explore which factors may contribute to the differences reported in the studies, and to deduce how youth with ASD observe animals. Utilizing strict inclusion criteria, we examined databases between 1942 and 2023, identifying 21 studies in international peer-reviewed journals. Three main themes were identified: attentional engagement and detection, visual exploration, and behavior. Collectively, our findings suggest that the visual attention of youths with ASD towards animals appears comparable to that of neurotypical peers, at least in 2D pictures (i.e., eye gaze patterns). Future studies should explore whether these results extend to real-life interactions.
Natural environments are typically multisensory, comprising information from multiple sensory modalities. It is in the integration of these incoming sensory signals that we form our perceptual gestalt that allows us to navigate through the world with relative ease. However, differences in multisensory integration (MSI) ability are found in a number of clinical conditions. Throughout this chapter, we discuss how MSI differences contribute to phenotypic characterization of autism and schizophrenia. Although these clinical populations are often described as opposite each other on a number of spectra, we describe similarities in behavioral performance and neural functions between the two conditions. Understanding the shared features of autism and schizophrenia through the lens of MSI research allows us to better understand the neural and behavioral underpinnings of both disorders. We provide potential avenues for remediation of MSI function in these populations.
White matter, comprising approximately 50% of the human brain, is crucial for efficient neuronal signaling and a wide range of brain functions, including social cognition, sensation, memory, motor control, and information integration across cortical brain regions in the service of perception and cognition. White matter, composed of myelinated axons, results from complex interactions between different cell types, with oligodendrocytes (OLs) and microglia playing integral roles. Microglia, the brain's resident immune cells, regulate oligodendrogenesis through phagocytosis and molecular signaling, for example through cytokines, which promote and inhibit maturation stages of OL lineage cells. Maternal immune activation (MIA) is a recognized risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders, especially autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The physiological presentation of ASD includes white matter abnormalities and immune dysregulation. Emerging evidence indicates that MIA may reduce microglial reactivity and alter cytokine release in offspring, potentially disrupting the delicate balance required for proper white matter development. Understanding the intricate interplay between oligodendrocytes, microglia, inflammation, and white matter development in the context of MIA provides valuable insights into the etiology of and core symptoms of ASD and possible therapeutic targets.
While the autism diagnosis emphasizes “deficits” in social communication, the article advances that sensory–movement differences underpin autism through a review of the following sources of evidence. This account critically challenges “autistic regression”, with evidence that sensory–movement features appear by birth as the earliest signs of autism and underlie the behavioral differences used for diagnosis, which may reflect adaptations to inherent differences and misunderstandings from others. Sensory and motor differences are salient to autistic people, but they often go underrecognized by others. They cause cascading effects in infancy on behavior and communication through differences in sensorimotor learning, automatic imitation, eye contact, sensory perception, and interests. The article then explains how sensory processing differences may influence reduced perceptual narrowing, which involves a bottom-up information processing style grounded in the surrounding environment. Furthermore, this bottom-up processing may grow from reduced sensory integration in feedback loops potentially involving the cerebellum of the brain. The article then moves into implications for the widespread consequences of these inherent differences on quality of life. The article closes with implications for autism as a construct (including underestimated empathy and pain), testing the theory, providing sensory-sensitive support and acceptance of autistic people, and applications to diverse autistic people. The theory may apply particularly well to autistic women and girls, autistic people with speech divergence, autistic people with ADHD, and autistic people with co-occurring sensory and motor-related neurodivergences. Throughout the article, the theory also provides clinical, neurological, and experiential evidence for sensory and motor differences as lifelong, challenging the notion of “losing” (an) autism (diagnosis) as instead reflecting (risky and not necessarily “successful”) camouflaging.
Emotion recognition (ER) deficit in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is widely accepted, and a variety of research was done to assess the deficit in ER under various conditions and intervention research to augment emotion recognition in mostly children with ASD. This scoping review attempted to summarize the diverse research in the context of ER in ASD with a focus on the facial expression databases used for research and intervention. PRISMA‐ScR guidelines were followed, and 80 studies were selected after a search from electronic research databases like Web of Science and PubMed with predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The trends indicate a small sample size with mostly children as a sample and the ASD group with their matched counterparts. The results show mixed findings; the majority of work indicates a deficit in facial emotion recognition in ASD, but under certain stimuli and conditions, ASD performs well in facial emotion recognition. The interventions showed promising results with increased ER ability in children with ASD. The review also focused on the moderating factors in the study of ER, such as age, IQ, comorbidity, task paradigm, and cultural factors. A small subset of facial expression databases was widely used in the research and intervention, and it has been developed and validated in Western countries. Research gaps were highlighted, and recommendations for future directions were mentioned.
The practice of evidence-based treatment of challenging behavior in autism has been heavily influenced by the application of principles and practices based on the experimental analysis of behavior, particularly applied behavior analysis (ABA), to deficits or excesses in the behavioral repertoire of individuals with autism spectrum and related neurodevelopmental disorders. Indeed, for over 70 years, the learning principles established by Skinner and others have guided both the assessment and intervention process, evolving systematically as new findings are published and replicated. From early work addressing self-injury and aggression in those with severe developmental disabilities (Lovaas and Simmons, J Appl Behav Anal 2:143–157, 1969) to the most contemporary efforts to modify behavior through the use of antecedent manipulations (Luiselli and Cameron, Antecedent control: innovative approaches to behavioral support. Paul Brookes, 1998; Martinez et al., Educ Train Autism Dev Disabil 51(3):265–280, 2016), procedures based on functional equivalence (Carr, Functional equivalence as a mechanism of response generalization. In Generalization and maintenance: life-style changes in applied settings. Paul Brookes, 1988), and others based on positive behavior supports (Bambara and Kern, Individualized supports for students with problem behaviors: designing positive behavior plans. The Guildford Press, 2005), ABA has distinguished itself by a rigorous approach to quantifying the variables responsible for treatment success, by a reliance on functional analysis (Iwata et al., J Appl Behav Anal 27:197–209, 1994a), including the direct observation of both the molecular and molar nature of behavior (Powers, Behavioral assessment of autism. In Diagnosis and assessment of autism. Plenum, 1988), and by the demand for generalization, maintenance, and replicability of treatment effects (Baer et al., J Appl Behav Anal 1:91–97, 1968). In order to meet these standards, the field has relied upon the use of single-subject experimental designs (SSED) primarily, but has demonstrated the magnitude of effect by the replicability of findings by different researchers and clinicians. As such, the process of determining which practices are “evidence-based” is better understood as the description of which specific intervention strategies have demonstrated efficacy for which behavioral challenges are maintained by which variables, in what child or adult, under what conditions. Within this rubric, it becomes quickly evident that precise treatment is impossible without precise assessment. The strategy that resolves these predictive, formative, and summative evaluation concerns is termed Functional Behavioral Assessment, while the intervention process is described in various ways, including behavioral treatment, ABA, positive behavior support, etc.
When observing others’ behaviors, we continuously integrate their movements with the corresponding sounds to enhance perception and develop adaptive responses. However, how the human brain integrates these complex audiovisual cues based on their natural temporal correspondence remains unclear. Using electroencephalogram (EEG), we demonstrated that rhythmic cortical activity tracked the hierarchical rhythmic structures in audiovisually congruent human walking movements and footstep sounds. Remarkably, the cortical tracking effects exhibit distinct multisensory integration modes at two temporal scales: an additive mode in a lower-order, narrower temporal integration window (step cycle) and a super-additive enhancement in a higher-order, broader temporal window (gait cycle). Furthermore, while neural responses at the lower-order timescale reflect a domain-general audiovisual integration process, cortical tracking at the higher-order timescale is exclusively engaged in the integration of biological motion cues. In addition, only this higher-order, domain-specific cortical tracking effect correlates with individuals’ autistic traits, highlighting its potential as a neural marker for autism spectrum disorder. These findings unveil the multifaceted mechanism whereby rhythmic cortical activity supports the multisensory integration of human motion, shedding light on how neural coding of hierarchical temporal structures orchestrates the processing of complex, natural stimuli across multiple timescales.
Attention to social stimuli is a key component of social behavior and facilitates the development of fundamental social skills. Studies investigating social attention in neurotypical or neurodiverse populations have often relied on screen-based experiments using static images or videos, which lack the sensory richness and reciprocity present in real-life social interactions. This can possibly be attributed to the challenges one encounters when creating naturalistic experiments, such as dealing with dynamically moving areas of interest (AOIs), which require either time-intensive manual coding or restraining of participants. Here, we present findings from an experimental paradigm using unrestrained mobile eye-tracking and a face detection algorithm (MTCNN) to measure fixation rates during a semi-structured, face-to-face interview. Data from N = 62 healthy adult participants was analyzed for gaze behavior and related to participants’ autistic traits. We observed a significant negative correlation between fixation rates on the eye region averaged over the entire interaction and scores on the autism spectrum quotient (AQ) (r = −0.14), indicating participants with high autistic traits fixated less frequently on the eye region. We also compared different types of interview questions (open vs. closed) to explore whether the reduction in fixation rates was more pronounced for specific time intervals during the interview. Lastly, we discuss both possibilities for extensions as well as limitations of the presented paradigm that could serve as inspiration for future research.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-024-79210-8.
A growing body of research shows that children with autism exhibit selective limitations in their ability to direct their visual attention to social stimuli. The cause of this selective limitation, however, remains unknown. The main purpose of this study is to determine whether the limitations in social attention are influenced by the objects in the environment. Specifically, the study examines the differences in visual attention between children with autism and typically developing (TD) children as they view videos of social interactions under two conditions, with and without objects. The sample consisted of 53 children with autism and 74 TD children, aged between 18 and 36 months. The findings indicated that young children with autism exhibited differences in their social attention compared to their TD peers. The results revealed that the presence of objects did not affect the visual attention differences between the two groups. However, removing objects from the environment positively impacted the social attention of both groups. In the condition without objects, both groups directed more visual attention more toward the Face and Body Areas of Interests (AoIs), whereas in the condition with objects, both groups prioritized looking at the Toy AoI. These findings have important implications for evidence-based decision-making, especially in designing early intervention environments for children with autism.
Ο συγκεκριμένος τόμος περιλαμβάνει το άρθρο Μη λεκτική επικοινωνία στη διδασκαλία: Διερεύνηση της «γλώσσας του σώματος» των εκπαιδευτικών. Απώτερος σκοπός είναι η ανάδειξη της σημασίας της μη λεκτικής συμπεριφοράς στη διδακτική πράξη, καθώς η συνειδητοποίηση της κατά κύριο λόγο ακούσιας έκφρασης μη λεκτικών μηνυμάτων στην αίθουσα διδασκαλίας από τον ίδιο τον εκπαιδευτικό μπορεί να συμβάλει στη διαμόρφωση κατάλληλου παιδαγωγικού κλίματος, που θα ενισχύσει την αλληλεπίδραση μεταξύ δασκάλων και μαθητών και θα διεγείρει την ενεργή εμπλοκή των μαθητών στη μαθησιακή διαδικασία.
Joint attention (JA), a core deficit in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is crucial for social interaction, emotional understanding, and cognitive development. This study aims to compare and analyze the eye-tracking data of ASD and typically developing children (TDC) during virtual games, exploring how different cue types affect JA performance in ASD children. A total of 31 TDC and 40 ASD children participated in the study. Using eye-tracking devices, we recorded the children’s eye movements as they played virtual games, selecting the correct target based on cues provided by virtual characters. Our findings revealed that different cue types significantly impacted the game scores of ASD children but had no significant effect on TDC, highlighting a notable disparity between the two groups. ASD children showed a lower fixation frequency, irregular fixation paths, and increased attention to non-target objects compared to TDC. Interestingly, among the three cue types, ASD children exhibited a preference for the third type, leading to longer fixation on the region of interest and higher game scores. These results underscore the importance of cue selection in enhancing JA in ASD children. This study provides novel insights into the JA deficits in ASD children and offers a scientific basis for the development of targeted and individualized intervention programs.
Pupillometry has gained attention as a valuable tool for assessing autonomic nervous system activity and studying phasic changes in pupil size to comprehend underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. However, knowledge regarding pupillary responses to social processing in autism is limited.
We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis, examining research studies on pupil size changes that compare social and non-social stimuli in autism. Electronic searches were performed for articles up to September 2023 and relevant studies were evaluated following PRISMA guidelines. Out of 284 articles screened, 14 studies were eligible for systematic review. The results indicated that non-autistic individuals showed larger pupil size for social compared to non-social stimuli (g = 0.54; 95% CI [0.25 0.82]), whereas autistic individuals seemed to exhibit no differences between the two conditions. However, high heterogeneity was observed between studies in autistic populations, compromising interpretability. Despite such limitations, pupillary responses may constitute an objective physiological marker of social processing in autism. This review emphasizes the need for further investigations into pupillary responses in autism across different life stages.
Work aimed at characterizing the biological bases of autism has revealed a multiplicity of neural and genetic factors potentially associated with the condition. Combining information from multiple modalities and focusing on a specific, more homogenous subpopulation within the spectrum will help to parse this heterogeneity. In this chapter, we first briefly review major findings regarding the neural and genetic bases of autism broadly speaking, as well as a leading theory related to the etiology of autism, specifically in persons assigned female at birth (the “female protective effect” hypothesis). Thereafter, we discuss existing literature (N = 14 studies identified via systematic review) addressing the intersection of genetic and neural factors in the emergence and expression of autism in individuals assigned female at birth. These reports implicate sex differences in striatal, oxytocinergic, and neuroimmune systems, but further research in independent cohorts is needed to replicate and extend these findings. To conclude, we briefly review ethical considerations related to autism neurogenetic work, particularly concerns raised within the autism community, and provide recommendations for neurogenetic researchers.
When observing others’ behaviors, we continuously integrate their movements with the corresponding sounds to achieve efficient perception and develop adaptive responses. However, how human brains integrate these complex audiovisual cues based on their natural temporal correspondence remains unknown. Using electroencephalogram, we demonstrated that cortical oscillations entrained to hierarchical rhythmic structures in audiovisually congruent human walking movements and footstep sounds. Remarkably, the entrainment effects at different time scales exhibit distinct modes of multisensory integration, i.e., an additive integration effect at a basic-level integration window (step-cycle) and a super-additive multisensory enhancement at a higher-order temporal integration window (gait-cycle). Moreover, only the cortical tracking of higher-order rhythmic structures is specialized for the multisensory integration of human motion signals and correlates with individuals’ autistic traits, suggesting its functional relevance to biological motion perception and social cognition. These findings unveil the multifaceted roles of entrained cortical activity in the multisensory perception of human motion, shedding light on how hierarchical cortical entrainment orchestrates the processing of complex, rhythmic stimuli in natural contexts.
The visual processing differences seen in autism often impede individuals' visual perception of the social world. In particular, many autistic people exhibit poor face recognition. Here, we sought to determine whether autistic adults also show impaired perception of dyadic social interactions—a class of stimulus thought to engage face‐like visual processing. Our focus was the perception of interpersonal distance. Participants completed distance change detection tasks, in which they had to make perceptual decisions about the distance between two actors. On half of the trials, participants judged whether the actors moved closer together; on the other half, whether they moved further apart. In a nonsocial control task, participants made similar judgments about two grandfather clocks. We also assessed participants' face recognition ability using standardized measures. The autistic and nonautistic observers showed similar levels of perceptual sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance when viewing social interactions. As expected, however, the autistic observers showed clear signs of impaired face recognition. Despite putative similarities between the visual processing of faces and dyadic social interactions, our results suggest that these two facets of social vision may dissociate.
There is growing interest in understanding the visual behavioral patterns of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) based on their attentional preferences. Attention reveals the cognitive or perceptual variation in ASD, and can serve as a biomarker to assist diagnosis and intervention. The development of machine learning methods for attention-based ASD screening shows promises, yet it has been limited by the need for high-precision eye trackers, the scope of stimuli, and black-box neural networks, making it impractical for real-life clinical scenarios. This study proposes an interpretable and generalizable framework for quantifying atypical attention in people with ASD. Our framework utilizes photos taken by participants with standard cameras, to enable practical and flexible deployment in resource-constrained regions. With an emphasis on interpretability and trustworthiness, our method automates human-like diagnostic reasoning, associates photos with semantically plausible attention patterns, and provides clinical evidence to support ASD experts. We further evaluate models on both in-domain and out-of-domain data, and demonstrate that our approach accurately classifies individuals with ASD and generalizes across different domains. The proposed method offers an innovative, reliable, and cost-effective tool to assist the diagnostic procedure, which can be an important effort toward transforming clinical research in ASD screening with artificial intelligence systems. Our code is publicly available at
https://github.com/szzexpoi/proto_asd
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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental disorder defined by social communication deficits plus repetitive behaviors and restricted interests, currently affects 1/36 children in the general population. Recent advances in functional brain imaging show promise to provide useful biomarkers of ASD diagnostic likelihood, behavioral trait severity, and even response to therapeutic intervention. However, current gold-standard neuroimaging methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging) are limited in naturalistic studies of brain function underlying ASD-associated behaviors due to the constrained imaging environment. To overcome these limitations, we aimed to establish high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT), a non-invasive and minimally constraining optical neuroimaging modality, to evaluate brain function in autistic and non-autistic school-age children as they performed a biological motion perception task previously shown to yield results related to both ASD diagnosis and behavioral traits. Herein, we used HD-DOT to image brain function in 46 ASD school-age participants, 49 non-autistic controls (NAC), and 17 pro-band siblings as they viewed dynamic point-light displays of coherent biological and scrambled motion. We assessed group-level cortical brain function with statistical parametric mapping. Additionally, we tested for brain-behavior associations with dimensional metrics of autism traits, as measured with the Social Responsiveness Scale-2, with hierarchical regression models. We found that NAC participants presented stronger brain activity contrast (coherent > scrambled) than ASD children in cortical regions related to visual, motor, and social processing. Additionally, regression models revealed multiple cortical regions in autistic participants where brain function is significantly associated with dimensional measures of autism traits. This study demonstrates that HD-DOT is sensitive to brain function that both differentiates between NAC and ASD groups and correlates with dimensional measures of ASD traits. These findings establish HD-DOT as an effective tool for investigating brain function in autistic and non-autistic children and opens the door to future studies on brain function underlying natural behaviors.
Autistic individuals show substantially reduced benefit from observing visual articulations during audiovisual speech perception, a multisensory integration deficit that is particularly relevant to social communication. This has mostly been studied using simple syllabic or word‐level stimuli and it remains unclear how altered lower‐level multisensory integration translates to the processing of more complex natural multisensory stimulus environments in autism. Here, functional neuroimaging was used to examine neural correlates of audiovisual gain (AV‐gain) in 41 autistic individuals to those of 41 age‐matched non‐autistic controls when presented with a complex audiovisual narrative. Participants were presented with continuous narration of a story in auditory‐alone, visual‐alone, and both synchronous and asynchronous audiovisual speech conditions. We hypothesized that previously identified differences in audiovisual speech processing in autism would be characterized by activation differences in brain regions well known to be associated with audiovisual enhancement in neurotypicals. However, our results did not provide evidence for altered processing of auditory alone, visual alone, audiovisual conditions or AV‐ gain in regions associated with the respective task when comparing activation patterns between groups. Instead, we found that autistic individuals responded with higher activations in mostly frontal regions where the activation to the experimental conditions was below baseline (de‐activations) in the control group. These frontal effects were observed in both unisensory and audiovisual conditions, suggesting that these altered activations were not specific to multisensory processing but reflective of more general mechanisms such as an altered disengagement of Default Mode Network processes during the observation of the language stimulus across conditions.
Atypical deployment of social gaze is present early on in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Yet, studies characterizing the developmental dynamic behind it are scarce. Here we used a data-driven method to delineate the developmental change in visual exploration of social interaction over childhood years in autism. Longitudinal eye-tracking data were acquired as children with ASD and their typically developing (TD) peers freely explored a short cartoon movie. We found divergent moment-to-moment gaze patterns in children with ASD compared to their TD peers. This divergence was particularly evident in sequences that displayed social interactions between characters and even more so in children with lower developmental and functional levels. The basic visual properties of the animated scene did not account for the enhanced divergence. Over childhood years, these differences dramatically increased to become more idiosyncratic. These findings suggest that social attention should be targeted early in clinical treatments.
A variety of studies have suggested that at least some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) view the world differently. Differences in gaze patterns as measured by eye tracking have been demonstrated during visual exploration of images and natural viewing of movies with social content. Here we analyzed the temporal randomness of saccades and blinks during natural viewing of movies, inspired by a recent measure of “randomness” applied to micro‐movements of the hand and head in ASD (Torres et al., 2013; Torres & Denisova, 2016). We analyzed a large eye‐tracking dataset of 189 ASD and 41 typically developing (TD) children (1–11 years old) who watched three movie clips with social content, each repeated twice. We found that oculomotor measures of randomness, obtained from gamma parameters of inter‐saccade intervals (ISI) and blink duration distributions, were significantly higher in the ASD group compared with the TD group and were correlated with the ADOS comparison score, reflecting increased “randomness” in more severe cases. Moreover, these measures of randomness decreased with age, as well as with higher cognitive scores in both groups and were consistent across repeated viewing of each movie clip. Highly “random” eye movements in ASD children could be associated with high “neural variability” or noise, poor sensory‐motor control, or weak engagement with the movies. These findings could contribute to the future development of oculomotor biomarkers as part of an integrative diagnostic tool for ASD.
Day-old chicks were exposed to point-light animation sequences depicting either a walking hen or a rotating cylinder. On
a subsequent free-choice test (experiment 1) the chicks approached the novel stimulus, irrespective of this being the hen
or the cylinder. In order to obtain equivalent local motion vectors, in experiments 2 and 3 newly hatched chicks were exposed
either to a point-light animation sequence depicting a walking hen, or to a positionally scrambled walking hen (i.e. an animation
in which exactly the same set of dots in motion as that employed for the walking hen was presented, but with spatially randomized
starting positions). Chicks tested on day 1 (experiment 2) or on day 2 (i.e. after a period in the dark following exposure
on day 1 (experiment 3)) proved able to discriminate the two animation sequences: males preferentially approached the novel
stimulus, females the familiar one. These results indicate that discrimination was not based on local motion vectors, but
rather on the temporally integrated motion sequence.
1. Processing of visual information in primates is believed to occur in at least two separate cortical pathways, commonly labeled the "form" and "motion" pathways. This division lies in marked contrast to our everyday visual experience, in which we have a unified percept of both the form and motion of objects, implying integration of both types of information. We report here on a neuronal population in the anterior part of the superior temporal polysensory area (STPa) both sensitive to form (heads and bodies) and selective for motion direction. 2. A total of 161 cells were found to be sensitive to body form and motion. The majority of cells (125 of 161, 78%) responded to only one combination of view and direction (termed unimodal cells, e.g., left profile view moving left, not right profile moving left, or left profile moving right). We show that the response of some of these cells is selective for both the motion and the form of a single object, not simply the juxtaposition of appropriate form and motion signals. 3. A smaller number of cells (9 of 161, 6%) responded selectively to two opposite combinations of view and direction (e.g., left profile moving left and right profile moving right, but no other view and direction combinations). A few cells (4 of 161, 2%) showed "object-centered" selectivity to view and direction combinations, responding to all directions of motion where the body moves in a direction compatible with the direction it faces, for example, responding to left profile going left, right profile going right, face view moving toward the observer, back view moving away from the observer, but not other view and direction combinations. 4. The majority of the neurons (106 of 138, 77%) selective for specific body view and direction combinations responded best to compatible motion (e.g., left profile moving left), and one fourth (23%) showed selectivity for incompatible motion (e.g., right profile moving left). 5. The relative strengths of motion and form inputs to cells in STPa conjointly sensitive to information about form and motion were assessed. The majority of the responses (95%) were characterized as showing nonlinear summation of form and motion inputs. 6. The capacity to discriminate different directions and different forms was compared across three populations of STPa cells, namely those sensitive to 1) form only, 2) motion only, and 3) both form and motion. The selectivity of the latter class could be predicted from combinations of the other two classes. 7. The response latencies of cells selective for form and motion are on average coincident with cells selective for direction of motion (but not stimulus form). Both these cell populations have response latencies on average 20 ms earlier than cells selective for static form. 8. Calculation of the average of early response latency cells (cell whose response latency was under the sample mean) suggests that direction information is present in cell responses some 35 ms before form information becomes evident. Direction information and form information become evident within 5 ms of each other in the average late response latency cells (those cells whose response latency was greater than the sample mean). Inputs relating to movement show an initial response period that does not discriminate direction. The quality of initial direction discrimination appeared to be independent of response latency. The initial discrimination of form was related to response latency in that cells with longer response latencies showed greater initial discrimination of form in their responses. We argue that these findings are consistent with form inputs arriving to area STPa approximately 20 ms after motion inputs into area STPa.
One of the more stunning examples of the resourcefulness of human vision is the ability to see 'biological motion', which was first shown with an adaptation of earlier cinematic work: illumination of only the joints of a walking person is enough to convey a vivid, compelling impression of human animation, although the percept collapses to a jumble of meaningless lights when the walker stands still. The information is sufficient to discriminate the sex and other details of the walker, and can be interpreted by young infants. Here we measure the ability of the visual system to integrate this type of motion information over space and time, and compare this capacity with that for viewing simple translational motion. Sensitivity to biological motion increases rapidly with the number of illuminated joints, far more rapidly than for simple motion. Furthermore, this information is summed over extended temporal intervals of up to 3 seconds (eight times longer than for simple motion). The steepness of the summation curves indicates that the mechanisms that analyse biological motion do not integrate linearly over space and time with constant efficiency, as may occur for other forms of complex motion, but instead adapt to the nature of the stimulus.
The ability to “mentalize,” that is to understand and manipulate other people's behavior in terms of their mental states,
is a major ingredient in successful social interactions. A rudimentary form of this ability may be seen in great apes, but
in humans it is developed to a high level. Specific impairments of mentalizing in both developmental and acquired disorders
suggest that this ability depends on a dedicated and circumscribed brain system. Functional imaging studies implicate medial
prefrontal cortex and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) as components of this system. Clues to the specific function
of these components in mentalizing come from single cell recording studies: STS is concerned with representing the actions
of others through the detection of biological motion; medial prefrontal regions are concerned with explicit representation
of states of the self. These observations suggest that the ability to mentalize has evolved from a system for representing
actions.
Normative-IQ individuals with autism are capable of solving explicit social cognitive problems at a level that is not matched by their ability to meet the demands of everyday social situations. The magnitude of this discrepancy is now being documented through newer techniques such as eye tracking, which allows us to see and measure how individuals with autism search for meaning when presented with naturalistic social scenes. This paper offers an approach to social cognitive development intended to address the above discrepancy, which is considered a key element for any understanding of the pathophysiology of autism. This approach, called the enactive mind (EM), originates from the emerging work on 'embodied cognitive science', a neuroscience framework that views cognition as bodily experiences accrued as a result of an organism's adaptive actions upon salient aspects of the surrounding environment. The EM approach offers a developmental hypothesis of autism in which the process of acquisition of embodied social cognition is derailed early on, as a result of reduced salience of social stimuli and concomitant enactment of socially irrelevant aspects of the environment.
Passive viewing of biological motion engages extensive regions of the posterior temporal-occipital cortex in humans, particularly
within and nearby the superior temporal sulcus (STS). Relatively little is known about the functional specificity of this
area. Some recent studies have emphasized the perceived intentionality of the motion as a potential organizing principle,
while others have suggested the existence of a somatotopy based upon the limb perceived in motion. Here we conducted an event-related
functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment to compare activity elicited by movement of the eyes, mouth or hand. Each
motion evoked robust activation in the right posterior temporal-occipital cortex. While there was substantial overlap of the
activation maps in this region, the spatial distribution of hemodynamic response amplitudes differentiated the movements.
Mouth movements elicited activity along the mid-posterior STS while eye movements elicited activity in more superior and posterior
portions of the right posterior STS region. Hand movements activated more inferior and posterior portions of the STS region
within the posterior continuing branch of the STS. Hand-evoked activity also extended into the inferior temporal, middle occipital
and lingual gyri. This topography may, in part, reflect the role of particular body motions in different functional activities.
Diminished gaze fixation is one of the core features of autism and has been proposed to be associated with abnormalities in the neural circuitry of affect. We tested this hypothesis in two separate studies using eye tracking while measuring functional brain activity during facial discrimination tasks in individuals with autism and in typically developing individuals. Activation in the fusiform gyrus and amygdala was strongly and positively correlated with the time spent fixating the eyes in the autistic group in both studies, suggesting that diminished gaze fixation may account for the fusiform hypoactivation to faces commonly reported in autism. In addition, variation in eye fixation within autistic individuals was strongly and positively associated with amygdala activation across both studies, suggesting a heightened emotional response associated with gaze fixation in autism.
When only a small number of points of light attached to the torso and limbs of a moving organism are visible, the animation correctly conveys the animal's activity. Here we report that newly hatched chicks, reared and hatched in darkness, at their first exposure to point-light animation sequences, exhibit a spontaneous preference to approach biological motion patterns. Intriguingly, this predisposition is not specific for the motion of a hen, but extends to the pattern of motion of other vertebrates, even to that of a potential predator such as a cat. The predisposition seems to reflect the existence of a mechanism in the brain aimed at orienting the young animal towards objects that move semi-rigidly (as vertebrate animals do), thus facilitating learning, i.e., through imprinting, about their more specific features of motion.
Observers recognize subtle changes in the movements of others with relative ease. However, tracking a walking human is computationally difficult, because the degree of articulation is high and scene changes can temporarily occlude parts of the moving figure. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test the hypothesis that the superior temporal sulcus (STS) uses form cues to aid biological movement tracking. The same 10 healthy subjects detected human gait changes in a walking mannequin in two experiments. In experiment 1, we tested the effects of configural change and occlusion. The walking mannequin was presented intact or with the limbs and torso apart in visual space and either unoccluded or occluded by a set of vertical white bars. In experiment 2, the effects of inversion and occlusion were investigated, using an intact walking mannequin. Subjects reliably detected gait changes under all stimulus conditions. The intact walker produced significantly greater activation in the STS, inferior temporal sulcus (ITS), and inferior parietal cortex relative to the apart walker, regardless of occlusion. Interestingly, STS and ITS activation to the upright versus inverted walker was not significantly different. In contrast, superior parietal lobule and parieto-occipital cortex showed greater activation to the apart relative to intact walker. In the absence of an intact body configuration, parietal cortex activity increased to the independent movements of the limbs and torso. Our data suggest that the STS may use a body configuration-based model to process biological movement, thus forming a representation that survives partial occlusion.
An inborn predisposition to attend to biological motion has long been theorized, but had so far been demonstrated only in one animal species (the domestic chicken). In particular, no preference for biological motion was reported for human infants of <3 months of age. We tested 2-day-old babies' discrimination after familiarization and their spontaneous preferences for biological vs. nonbiological point-light animations. Newborns were shown to be able to discriminate between two different patterns of motion (Exp. 1) and, when first exposed to them, selectively preferred to look at the biological motion display (Exp. 2). This preference was also orientation-dependent: newborns looked longer at upright displays than upside-down displays (Exp. 3). These data support the hypothesis that detection of biological motion is an intrinsic capacity of the visual system, which is presumably part of an evolutionarily ancient and nonspecies-specific system predisposing animals to preferentially attend to other animals.
Preface Part I. Introduction Stochastics Models Related to the Probability of an Event Traditional Estimation Procedures Part II. Theory Measurement and Prediction Procedures Complete Measurement Procedures Exclusion Procedures Comparison Procedures Part III. Introduction to the Tables Measurement Intervals Prediction Regions Part IV. Application Measuring a Probability Excluding a Probability Comparing Probabilities Part V. Tables Glossary References Index
In the last years the researches at the sphere of fetal neurology did the big progress. The researches are generally supported by the investigation of fetal behaviour which directly represents the function and histogenetic processes in the central nervous system. Everyone alteration in the neurological system reflects in the changes of fetal activity and - consecutively - by observation the fetal activity the condition of fetal nervous system may be conclued. The break moment in the appraisal of fetal motility was the introduction of 3D and 4D ultrasound, which besides a better visualization of fetal structures have simultaneously enable the real time examination of fetal movements. That indicated a lot of investigations of fetal movements in the normal but in pathologic pregnancy as well and resulted in the construc-tion of a new prenatal screening neurological test. In preliminary examinations the test presents an important potential in recognizing of impairement of the fetal central nervous system.
With behavioral techniques, cats were trained to discriminate a point-light animation sequence depicting biological motion (i.e., a cat walking) from an animation sequence consisting of equivalent local motion vectors lacking the global synchrony present in the biological-motion sequence (i.e., “foil” displays). Successful discrimination was evidenced for even the most difficult foil display and for different versions of the biological-motion sequence, indicating that cats are able to extract the higher order kinematic invariants embodied in these novel motion displays.
This paper reports the first phase of a research program on visual perception of motion patterns characteristic of living
organisms in locomotion. Such motion patterns in animals and men are termed here as biological motion. They are characterized
by a far higher degree of complexity than the patterns of simple mechanical motions usually studied in our laboratories. In
everyday perceptions, the visual information from biological motion and from the corresponding figurative contour patterns
(the shape of the body) are intermingled. A method for studying information from the motion pattern per se without interference
with the form aspect was devised. In short, the motion of the living body was represented by a few bright spots describing
the motions of the main joints. It is found that 10–12 such elements in adequate motion combinations in proximal stimulus
evoke a compelling impression of human walking, running, dancing, etc. The kinetic-geometric model for visual vector analysis
originally developed in the study of perception of motion combinations of the mechanical type was applied to these biological
motion patterns. The validity of this model in the present context was experimentally tested and the results turned out to
be highly positive.
An algorithm is proposed which automatically estimates the local signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) between speech and noise. The feature extraction stage of the algorithm is motivated by neurophysiological findings on amplitude modulation processing in higher stages of the auditory system in mammals. It analyzes information on both center frequencies and amplitude modulations of the input signal. This information is represented in two-dimensional, so-called amplitude modulation spectrograms (AMS). A neural network is trained on a large number of AMS patterns generated from mixtures of speech and noise. After training, the network supplies estimates of the local SNR when AMS patterns from "unknown" sound sources are presented. Classification experiments show a relatively accurate estimation of the present SNR in independent 32 ms analysis frames. Harmonicity appears to be the most important cue for analysis frames to be classified as "speech-like", but the spectro-temporal representation of sound in AMS patterns also allows for a reliable discrimination between unvoiced speech and noise.
According to a recent theory of dyslexia, the perceptual anchor theory, children with dyslexia show deficits in classic auditory and phonological tasks not because they have auditory or phonological impairments but because they are unable to form a 'perceptual anchor' in tasks that rely on a small set of repeated stimuli. The theory makes the strong prediction that rapid naming deficits should only be present in small sets of repeated items, not in large sets of unrepeated items. The present research tested this prediction by comparing rapid naming performance of a small set of repeated items with that of a large set of unrepeated items. The results were unequivocal. Deficits were found both for small and large sets of objects and numbers. The deficit was actually bigger for large sets than for small sets, which is the opposite of the prediction made by the anchor theory. In conclusion, the perceptual anchor theory does not provide a satisfactory account of some of the major hallmark effects of developmental dyslexia.
Within the first week of life, typical human newborns give preferential attention to the eyes of others. Similar findings in other species suggest that attention to the eyes is a highly conserved phylogenetic mechanism of social development. For children with autism, however, diminished and aberrant eye contact is a lifelong hallmark of disability.
To quantify preferential attention to the eyes of others at what is presently the earliest point of diagnosis in autism.
We presented the children with 10 videos. Each video showed an actress looking directly into the camera, playing the role of caregiver, and engaging the viewer (playing pat-a-cake, peek-a-boo, etc). Children's visual fixation patterns were measured by eye tracking.
Fifteen 2-year-old children with autism were compared with 36 typically developing children and with 15 developmentally delayed but nonautistic children.
Preferential attention was measured as percentage of visual fixation time to 4 regions of interest: eyes, mouth, body, and object. Level of social disability was assessed by the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule.
Looking at the eyes of others was significantly decreased in 2-year-old children with autism (P < .001), while looking at mouths was increased (P < .01) in comparison with both control groups. The 2 control groups were not distinguishable on the basis of fixation patterns. In addition, fixation on eyes by the children with autism correlated with their level of social disability; less fixation on eyes predicted greater social disability (r = -0.669, P < .01).
Looking at the eyes of others is important in early social development and in social adaptation throughout one's life span. Our results indicate that in 2-year-old children with autism, this behavior is already derailed, suggesting critical consequences for development but also offering a potential biomarker for quantifying syndrome manifestation at this early age.
When a small number of lights are placed on the limbs and joints of a moving human (or animal), the motions of the lights
(biological motion) are sufficient to enable adult observers to perceive immediately the activity of the human. This perception
of biological motion has been hypothesized to be an intrinsic capacity of the visual system. The results of this experiment,
which demonstrate that infants 4 to 6 months of age exhibit a preference for biological motion patterns, support that hypothesis.
We addressed the issue of how display orientation affects the perception of biological motion. In Experiment 1, spontaneous recognition of a point-light walker improved abruptly with image-plane display rotation from inverted to upright orientation. Within a range of orientations from 180 degrees to 90 degrees, it was dramatically impeded. Using ROC analysis, we showed (Experiments 2 and 3) that despite prior familiarization with a point-light figure at all orientations, its detectability within a mask decreased with a change in orientation from upright to a range of 90 degrees-180 degrees. In Experiment 4, a priming effect in biological motion was observed only if a prime corresponded to a range of deviations from upright orientation within which the display was spontaneously recognizable. The findings indicate that display orientation nonmonotonically affects the perception of biological motion. Moreover, top-down influence on the perception of biological motion is limited by display orientation.
Recent research on multisensory perception suggests a number of general principles for crossmodal integration and that the standard model in the field--feedforward convergence of information--must be modified to include a role for feedback projections from multimodal to unimodal brain areas.
There is a continuing debate in developmental neuroscience about the importance of activity-dependent processes. The relatively delayed rate of development of the human brain, compared with that of other mammals, might make it more susceptible to the influence of postnatal experience. The human infant is well adapted to capitalize on this opportunity through primitive biases to attend to relevant stimuli in its environment. The infant's interaction with its environment helps to sculpt inter- and intraregional connections within the cortex, eventually resulting in the highly specialized adult brain.
Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder that results in profound spatial cognitive deficits. We examined whether individuals with WS have intact perception of biological motion, which requires global spatial integration of local motion signals into a unitary percept of a human form. Children with WS, normal mental-age-matched children, and normal adults viewed point-light-walker (PLW) displays portraying a human figure walking to the left or right. Children with WS were as good as or better than control children in their ability to judge the walker's direction, even when it was masked with dynamic noise that mimicked the local motion of the PLW lights. These results show that mechanisms underlying the perception of at least some kinds of biological motion are unimpaired in children with WS. They provide the first evidence of selective sparing of a specialized spatial system in individuals with a known genetic impairment.
Autistic children and typically developing control children were tested on two visual tasks, one involving grouping of small line elements into a global figure and the other involving perception of human activity portrayed in point-light animations. Performance of the two groups was equivalent on the figure task, but autistic children were significantly impaired on the biological motion task. This latter deficit may be related to the impaired social skills characteristic of autism, and we speculate that this deficit may implicate abnormalities in brain areas mediating perception of human movement.
The quantity and quality of research into autism and related conditions have increased dramatically in recent years. Consequently we selectively review key accomplishments and highlight directions for future research. More consistent approaches to diagnosis and more rigorous assessment methods have significantly advanced research, although the boundaries of the ‘broader phenotype’ remain to be defined and the validity of Asperger's disorder as a discrete syndrome remains controversial. Recent epidemiological studies have shown that Autism Spectrum Disorders are common, but there continues to be debate about the causes of the increase in the frequency with which autism is diagnosed.
Psychological research has helped to develop new developmental models for the disorder and there have also been significant advances in the molecular genetics of autism and understanding of the underlying neurobiological processes. Areas important for future research include the study of autism as it first develops, i.e., in infants and very young children, and of specific processes (psychological and neurobiological) which underlie the disorder. Significant challenges lie ahead in evaluating the growing number of treatments for autism and in integrating the results of research into treatment and educational settings.
Autism is a severe developmental disorder marked by a triad of deficits, including impairments in reciprocal social interaction, delays in early language and communication, and the presence of restrictive, repetitive and stereotyped behaviors. In this review, it is argued that the search for the neurobiological bases of the autism spectrum disorders should focus on the social deficits, as they alone are specific to autism and they are likely to be most informative with respect to modeling the pathophysiology of the disorder. Many recent studies have documented the difficulties persons with an autism spectrum disorder have accurately perceiving facial identity and facial expressions. This behavioral literature on face perception abnormalities in autism is reviewed and integrated with the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) literature in this area, and a heuristic model of the pathophysiology of autism is presented. This model posits an early developmental failure in autism involving the amygdala, with a cascading influence on the development of cortical areas that mediate social perception in the visual domain, specifically the fusiform "face area" of the ventral temporal lobe. Moreover, there are now some provocative data to suggest that visual perceptual areas of the ventral temporal pathway are also involved in important ways in representations of the semantic attributes of people, social knowledge and social cognition. Social perception and social cognition are postulated as normally linked during development such that growth in social perceptual skills during childhood provides important scaffolding for social skill development. It is argued that the development of face perception and social cognitive skills are supported by the amygdala-fusiform system, and that deficits in this network are instrumental in causing autism.
Perception of biological motion (BM) is a fundamental property of the human visual system. It is as yet unclear which role the cerebellum plays with respect to the perceptual analysis of BM represented as point-light displays. Imaging studies investigating BM perception revealed inconsistent results concerning cerebellar contribution. The present study aimed to explore the role of the cerebellum in the perception of BM by testing the performance of BM perception in patients suffering from circumscribed cerebellar lesions and comparing their performance with an age-matched control group. Perceptual performance was investigated in an experimental task testing the threshold to detect BM masked by scrambled motion and a control task testing the detection of motion direction of coherent motion masked by random noise. Results show clear evidence for a differential contribution of the cerebellum to the perceptual analysis of coherent motion compared with BM. Whereas the ability to detect BM masked by scrambled motion was unaffected in the patient group, their ability to discriminate the direction of coherent motion in random noise was substantially affected. We conclude that intact cerebellar function is not a prerequisite for a preserved ability to detect BM. Because the dorsal motion pathway as well as the ventral form pathway contribute to the visual perception of BM, the question of whether cerebellar dysfunction affecting the dorsal pathway is compensated for by the unaffected ventral pathway or whether perceptual analysis of BM is performed completely without cerebellar contribution remains to be determined.
A vivid perception of a moving human can be evoked when viewing a few point-lights on the joints of an invisible walker. This special visual ability for biological motion perception has been found to involve the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STSp). However, in everyday life, human motion can also be recognized using acoustic cues. In the present study, we investigated the neural substrate of human motion perception when listening to footsteps, by means of a sparse sampling functional MRI design. We first showed an auditory attentional network that shares frontal and parietal areas previously found in visual attention paradigms. Second, an activation was observed in the auditory cortex (Heschl's gyrus and planum temporale), likely to be related to low-level sound processing. Most strikingly, another activation was evidenced in a STSp region overlapping the temporal biological motion area previously reported using visual input. We thus propose that a part of the STSp region might be a supramodal area involved in human motion recognition, irrespective of the sensory modality input.
The current study investigates how human infants process and interpret human movement. Neural correlates to the perception of biological motion by 8-month-old infants were assessed. Analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) resulting from the passive viewing of upright and inverted point-light displays (PLDs) depicting human movement indicated a larger positive amplitude in right parietal regions between 200 and 300 ms for observing upright PLDs when compared with observing inverted PLDs. These results show that infants at 8 months of age process upright and inverted PLDs differently from each other. The implications for our understanding of infant visual perception are discussed.
Detecting the direction of motion of other animals is critical for a variety of adaptive behaviours, including filial attachment and hunting prey. Two new studies support the view that some vertebrates, including humans, have primitive brain systems for the visual detection of other legged vertebrates.
Mounting clinical evidence suggests that abnormalities of social engagement in children with autism are present even during infancy. However, direct experimental documentation of these abnormalities is still limited. In this case report of a 15-month-old infant with autism, we measured visual fixation patterns to both naturalistic and ambiguous social stimuli: video scenes of a caregiver and point-light animations of human action. Results suggested that viewing patterns of the child with autism were driven by the physical contingencies of the stimuli rather than by their social context. If corroborated in larger studies, this observation would advance the hypothesis that mechanisms of social development which rely on preferential engagement with socially contingent conspecifics - and which emerge in the very first weeks of life in typical infants - are developmentally derailed in children with autism.
Speech is a means of communication that is intrinsically bimodal: the audio signal originates from the dynamics of the articulators. This paper reviews recent works in the field of audiovisual speech and more specifically on techniques developed to measure the level of correspondence between audio and visual speech. It overviews the most common audio and visual speech front-end processing, transformations performed on audio, visual or joint audiovisual feature spaces and the actual measure of correspondence between audio and visual speech. Finally, applications of this specific task are described. 1
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