A Method to Predict the “Severity” of Autism?
September 26, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Tracking eye movements has been described as a new way to detect autism in infants; researchers have also found that, when autistic children look at faces with animated expressions, they tend to focus on the eyes and mouth. A study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry has found that determining whether a toddler focuses on another person’s mouth or eyes can predict the level of disability in the child. From Science Daily:
After the first few weeks of life, infants look in the eyes of others, setting processes of socialization in motion. In infancy and throughout life, the act of looking at the eyes of others is a window into people’s feelings and thoughts and a powerful facilitator in shaping the formation of the social mind and brain.
The scientists found that the amount of time toddlers spent focused on the eyes predicted their level of social disability. The less they focused on the eyes, the more severely disabled they were. These results may offer a useful biomarker for quantifying the presence and severity of autism early in life and screen infants for autism. The findings could aid research on the neurobiology and genetics of autism, work that is dependent on quantifiable markers of syndrome expression.
Warren Jones, a research scientist from the Yale School of Medicine Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program and the Yale Child Study Center, suggests this as why a child who focuses on looking at the mouth rather than the eyes may be indicative of autism:
Our working hypothesis is that these children’s increased fixation on mouths points to a predisposition to seek physical, rather than social contingencies in their surrounding world. They focus on the physical synchrony between lip movements and speech sounds, rather than on the social-affective context of the entreating eye gaze of others………..These children may be seeing faces in terms of their physical attributes alone; watching a face without necessarily experiencing it as an engaging partner sharing in a social interaction.”
Interesting the distinction here between mouth and eyes, between a tendency to seek “physical, rather than social contingencies” when looking around at the world.
Researchers have also found that the parents of autistic children tend to evaluate facial expressions in ways similar to autistic individuals , and am now watching to see what Charlie’s eyes are drawn to.
“Our working hypothesis is that these children’s increased fixation on mouths points to a predisposition to seek physical, rather than social contingencies in their surrounding world.”
What free-associative twaddle! The whole premise is steeped in cultural biases about the social “meaning” of eye contact.
Mouths are just simply so much more expressive to some of us — regardless of “severity” (whatever that is construed to mean) — than eyes. Period.
Will some other body part be next……
Phil beat me to the punch on that comment – I was struck the same way when I read that.
My son looks at the mouth, for sure. He needs to make an extra effort to look directly in your eyes, even if he’s already looking at your face. However I’m not sure if this was true when he was a baby. I think this became more of an issue as he got older.
I have to agree with Phil. This study is meaningless unless its results can be replicated cross-culturally.
I’m reminded of the commentators in the 1950s who noticed that Puerto Rican kids in New York who were accused of school troublemaking wouldn’t look into their accusers’ eyes and concluded that Puerto Rican parents didn’t bother to teach their children “honesty.” What they didn’t realize was that in Puerto Rican culture, looking an authority figure directly in the eye would have been considered a gesture of defiance.
The pridefully Politcally Incorrect assume that what are, at most, differences between styles and fashions between different cultures or different times amount to differences between fundamental values (BTW, to all those who notice that today’s preteen girls are wearing much more “sexualized” clothing than they did when you were kids, please note that the real statistics (as opposed to sensationalized media reports that merely echo school gossip) show that if there’s been any change in teenage sexual activity in the last 40 years, it’s been slightly downward).
Abstract of the paper,
Jones, W., Carr, K., and Klin, A. (2008). Absence of preferential looking to the eyes of approaching adults predicts level of social disability in 2-Year-old toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 65, 946-954.
I would agree with the confound of social/cultural conditioning, except that it appears that there were control groups of same age typically developing and developmentally delayed but nonautistic children, so it sounds like there were within culture controls, if not across culture control. I also agree that it sounds somewhat speculative to discuss the meaning of preferential gaze and impact on developmental trajectory…but I am guessing (since I don’t have access to the full text at the moment) that the paper’s introduction and references might suggest why they chose this as a working hypothesis.
Tapestrip example of the tracking data
“Will some other body part be next……”
Well, the size of some of these researchers’ arses doesn’t seem to predict how much shit they come out with, does it? :/
Totally flawed, can’t predict anything until real longitudinal studies confirm.
In fact there is contradictory evidence on eye gaze as I recall, but that tends not to get the same publicity.
“love comes in at the eye, for the eye is the window of the soul” Well does anyone remember videodrome?
Eye tracking is the poor man’s anser to fmri, those that can’t afford the hi tech stuff
Looking through the full text,
How they calculated the relationship of % time observing the eyes (vs. mouth, body and objects in a video) to “social disability”–
>”…We performed correlations between percentage of fixation time to each region of interest in relation to the primary outcome measure of social disability, which was the algorithm score on the social cluster of the ADOS. We also performed correlations between percentage of fixation time to each region of interest in relation to measures of verbal and nonverbal functioning and chronological age for each of the 3 groups…”
From COMMENT,
“…From previous work with a 15-month-old child with autism,[14] we hypothesize that looking at another person’s mouth may be driven by attention to audiovisual synchrony. Children with autism may focus on the mouth initially because of its physically contingent properties, seeing the world in terms of its physical features rather than its social-affective context. This theoretical speculation suggests an alternative learning path for language acquisition: learning about language by parsing the physical relationship between motion and sound, rather than learning speech sounds as signifiers within a social context. This hypothesis would fit with both language delays and with persistent suprasegmental and pragmatic difficulties in individuals with autism (difficulties, for instance, in understanding sarcasm and nonliteral speech, where competence depends more on language within a social context than on language as a direct mapping of sound to single meaning).” …
Anyway, the full text was interesting and more clear on the limits and direct stated intent of the study, as well as the prior research that they drew from.
Last nights McCain – Obama debate highlights a peculiar problem with respect to eye contact. The one observation unanimously agreed upon is that John McCain never, not once, looked Obama in the eye. The neurodiversity crowd can now claim John McCain as one of their own.
Not that long ago, proper young ladies did not look adults in the eye. In many places in the world it would still be rude. My ’shyness’ in the 1960’s was considered OK because I was a girl.
@RAJ, now that could be a newsworthy finding…….
Charlie was about 5 years old when he started to really look at our mouths, or the speech therapists’ mouth, to imitate how we were saying words. I have to go back in my memory several times to consider what he was looking at, or not, in his early years.
I know when my twins were infants, I read some reference to a mom “gazing into her infant’s eyes endlessly”, and thinking, “Huh?” After that I noticed that my twins didn’t look into my eyes much at all. They would be considered “moderate” right now, although I hate making those distinctions.
The study sounds flaky to me, but just intuitively, I could imagine there might be something to it. But I think it’s irresponsible to talk about it being “predictive” of severity.
As the t-shirt says, eye-contact is overrated.
PLAYAGAIN
Kristina,
“Will some other body part be next?”
It already has. Do you remember the cranial studys that showed up in the news magazines?