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ment — denying them a key to unlocking
social understanding.
But toddlers with autism made an
exception for a video with a cartoon that
featured a game of patty-cake, where colliding dots representing two hands repeat-
edly produced a clapping
sound. This physical synchrony existed only for
the upright figure; the
inverted figure played in
reverse, so its motions
didn’t match the sound
track.
An analysis of other
sound-motion synchrony
in the five cartoons indicated that sensory pair-ings frequently drew
In a new study, toddlers with autism watched an ani- the attention of toddlers
mated body playing patty-cake. The kids paid attention with autism.
to audiovisual synchrony (depicted in bright colors in It’s too early to say
these shots from a video used in the study’s analysis). for sure whether autism
really involves a focus
on audiovisual synchronies, since a
broader mental trait could explain Klin’s
new findings, cautions psychologist and
autism researcher Mark Strauss of the
University of Pittsburgh. An intense
focus on details may partly explain a
tendency of kids with autism to ignore
moving bodies while focusing on syn-
chronized events (SN: 7/7/07, p. 4),
Strauss suggests. Greater difficulty in
detecting subtle eye movements versus
larger mouth movements may also con-
tribute to this pattern, he notes.
Questions remain about the extent to
which kids with autism make eye contact.
Klin’s team reported last year that 2-year-
olds with autism mainly look at people’s
mouths. But in another study, Strauss’
group finds that 8- to 12-year-olds with
autism look others in the eyes as much as
their non-autistic peers.
Klin’s group now plans to see whether
children with autism become more
social after receiving training that
directs attention away from synchronized sights and sounds and toward
signs of biological motion. s
Toddlers with autism may focus on
co-occurring sounds and motions
As a result, the kids may neglect cues to social interaction
By Bruce Bower
When 2-year-olds with autism look at
someone’s face, they may crave synchronized detection rather than social
connection. Toddlers with this developmental condition track sounds and sights
that occur together, such as a mother’s
lips moving in time with sounds coming
out of her mouth, rather than social cues,
such as that same mother’s smile, a new
study suggests.
Locked in a world of co-occurring
sound and motion, youngsters with
autism neglect social signals that critically contribute to mental and brain
development, propose Ami Klin of Yale
University’s Child Study Center and his
colleagues. “Our findings lead us to the Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda,
rather sad hypothesis that a toddler with Md., said in a statement.
autism might watch a face but not neces- Klin’s study employed point-light car-
sarily experience a person, since so much toons based on data from actors playing
of that experience involves mutual eye children’s games. Each animation, con-
gaze,” Klin says. sisting only of bright dots positioned at
The ne w study, published online body joints, played normally on one side
March 29in Nature, indicatesthatbyage2, of a computer screen. On the other side,
kids with autism pay no attention to the the animation played upside-down and
array of cues indicating that a in reverse. (Children with
“A toddler
body is moving. Non-autistic no developmental problems
children do so within days of have difficulty discerning
with autism
birth. Young animals in many movement made by inverted
might watch
species monitor signs of oth- figures.) An accompanying
a face but not
ers’ movements as cues to ini- sound track played with each
necessarily
tiate social contact. pair of cartoons.
While earlier studies have Eye-tracking devices
experience a
suggested that children with determined that 39 typically
person.”
autism often don’t look at AMI KLIN developing toddlers and 16
other people’s eyes, it’s been toddlers with non-autistic
YALE UNIVERSITY
unclear why. Few studies have included developmental delays preferred to look
toddlers or infants with autism because at upright animations, tracking biologi-they are difficult to diagnose and study. cal motion. In contrast, 21 toddlers with
“For the first time, this study has pin- autism tended to look back and forth at
pointed what grabs the attention of tod- both upright and reversed animated fig-dlers with autism spectrum disorders,” ures, suggesting that these children paid
Thomas Insel, director of the National no attention to whole-body move-
