Two-year-olds with autism orient to nonsocial contingencies rather than biological motion
By A. Klin, David Lin, Phillip Gorrindo, Gordon Ramsay, Warren Jones. Nature, 2009
889 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8387c58a5a3fd847f9b03760842dd49fec7cbb0e
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Lien Van Eylen
- Lee H. de-Wit
- Joshua John Diehl
- S. Wang
- Lauren M. Schmitt
- Charles R. Crowell
- Michael Anthony Villano
- R. Van der Hallen
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- The Cerebellum, Sensitive Periods, and Autism (2014, background): “Klin and colleagues (Klin et al., 2009) reported that 2-year-old autistic children attendedmore strongly to multisensory simple synchrony than more complex combinations associated with natural biological motion.”
- The Clinical Use of Robots for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Critical Review (2012, background): “…understanding the physical (object-related) world and relative weaknesses in understanding the social world (Klin, Lang, Cicchetti, & Volkmar, 2000; Klin, Lin, Gorrindo, Ramsay, & Jones, 2009), (b) are more responsive to feedback, even social feedback, when administered via technology rather than…”
- Precise minds in uncertain worlds: predictive coding in autism. (2014, background): “As a result, individuals with ASD may be slower at categorization learning (e.g., Klinger & Dawson, 2001; Soulières et al., 2011) and they may be less spontaneously extracting a prototype from a series of exemplars (e.g., Gastgeb, Dundas, Minshew, & Strauss, 2012; Vladusich, Olu-Lafe, Kim,…”