Comments on: A Method to Predict the “Severity” of Autism?

By: Ed

Ed — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:12:51 +0000

Kristina,

“Will some other body part be next?”

It already has. Do you remember the cranial studys that showed up in the news magazines?

By: shell

shell — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:37:42 +0000

PLAYAGAIN

By: Wendy

Wendy — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:42:44 +0000

As the t-shirt says, eye-contact is overrated.

By: MomtoJBG

MomtoJBG — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:04:28 +0000

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.

By: Kristina Chew, PhD

Kristina Chew, PhD — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:34:20 +0000

@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.

By: Ruth

Ruth — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 14:00:08 +0000

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.

By: RAJ

RAJ — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:57:43 +0000

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.

By: Regan

Regan — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:34:20 +0000

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.

By: laurentius-rex

laurentius-rex — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:51:54 +0000

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

By: David N. Andrews M. Ed. (Distinction)

David N. Andrews M. Ed. (Distinction) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:21:12 +0000

“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? :/