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Precursors to Social and Communication Difficulties in Infants At-Risk for Autism: Gaze Following and Attentional Engagement

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Abstract

Whilst joint attention (JA) impairments in autism have been widely studied, little is known about the early development of gaze following, a precursor to establishing JA. We employed eye-tracking to record gaze following longitudinally in infants with and without a family history of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at 7 and 13 months. No group difference was found between at-risk and low-risk infants in gaze following behaviour at either age. However, despite following gaze successfully at 13 months, at-risk infants with later emerging socio-communication difficulties (both those with ASD and atypical development at 36 months of age) allocated less attention to the congruent object compared to typically developing at-risk siblings and low-risk controls. The findings suggest that the subtle emergence of difficulties in JA in infancy may be related to ASD and other atypical outcomes.

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Abbreviations

AOI:

Area of interest

AT-sibs:

Atypically developing siblings

ADI-R:

Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised

ADOS-G:

Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Generic

ASD:

Autism spectrum disorder

ASD-sibs:

Autism spectrum disorder siblings

BASIS:

British Autism Study of Infant Siblings

BAP:

Broader autism phenotype

DAWBA:

Development and Wellbeing Assessment

ELC:

Early learning composite

ESCS:

Early Social Communication Scales

EL:

Expressive language

GEE:

Generalised estimating equation

JA:

Joint attention

MSEL:

Mullen Scales of Early Learning

PDD:

Pervasive developmental disorder

RL:

Receptive language

RJA:

Responding to joint attention

SCQ:

Social Communication Questionnaire

TD-sibs:

Typically developing siblings

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by, a Bloomsbury Colleges Scholarship to R. Bedford, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to M. Elsabbagh, and the BASIS funding consortium led by Autistica (www.basisnetwork.org) and a UK Medical Research Council Programme Grant (G0701484) to M.H. Johnson. The Centre for Research in Autism and Education is supported by The Clothworkers’ Foundation and Pears Foundation. T. Charman and M. Elsabbagh are supported by the COST Action BM1004. We thank all the families who participated in this study and Liz Pellicano for helpful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Research in Autism and Education, Institute of Education, University of London, 25 Woburn Square, London, WC1H 0AA, UK

    Rachael Bedford & Tony Charman

  2. Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Mayada Elsabbagh, Teodora Gliga, Atsushi Senju & Mark H. Johnson

  3. Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, UK

    Andrew Pickles

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  1. Rachael Bedford
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  2. Mayada Elsabbagh
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  3. Teodora Gliga
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  4. Andrew Pickles
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  5. Atsushi Senju
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  6. Tony Charman
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  7. Mark H. Johnson
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Correspondence to Rachael Bedford.

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The BASIS Team in alphabetical order: S. Baron-Cohen, P. Bolton, S. Chandler, J. Fernandes, H. Garwood, K. Hudry, L. Tucker, A. Volein.

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Bedford, R., Elsabbagh, M., Gliga, T. et al. Precursors to Social and Communication Difficulties in Infants At-Risk for Autism: Gaze Following and Attentional Engagement. J Autism Dev Disord 42, 2208–2218 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1450-y

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