Warren Jones

Two-year-olds with autism orient to non-social contingencies rather than biological motion.

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.

Altered face scanning and impaired recognition of biological motion in a 15‐month‐old infant with autism

Mounting clinical evidence suggests that abnormalities of social engagement in children with autism are present even during infancy. However, direct experimental documentation of these abnormalities is still limited. In this case report of a 15-month-old infant with autism, we measured visual fixation patterns to both naturalistic and ambiguous social stimuli: video scenes of a caregiver and point-light animations of human action. Results suggested that viewing patterns of the child with autism were driven by the physical contingencies of the stimuli rather than by their social context. If corroborated in larger studies, this observation would advance the hypothesis that mechanisms of social development which rely on preferential engagement with socially contingent conspecifics - and which emerge in the very first weeks of life in typical infants - are developmentally derailed in children with autism.

Heterogeneity and Homogeneity Across the Autism Spectrum: The Role of Development

Autism is a lifelong, highly prevalent, and strongly genetic disorder defined by impairments in social and communicative function and by pronounced behavioral rigidities. 1 Despite common areas of impairment that define autism as a condition, individuals with autism show a vast clinical variability in the expression and severity of their symptoms. This heterogeneity spans the entire range of IQ and language function and a wide array of communicative, social, and behavioral disabilities. At the level of genetics, the variability seems comparable: although more and more susceptibility loci are being identified, each is thought to account for only a small number of overall cases (e.g., see reference 2 ). Likewise, de novo mutations may play a causal role in a relatively large percentage (E10%) of individuals with autism who do not have an affected first-degree family relative. 3 Pursuit of research focused on Bsimplex[ and Bmultiplex[ families (i.e., with only one or with more than one sibling affected) has led to insights on potential modes and risks of inheritance, necessitating a unified genetic theory for

Attributing Social and Physical Meaning to Ambiguous Visual Displays in Individuals with Higher-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders.

The weak central coherence (WCC) account of autism characterizes the learning style of individuals with this condition as favoring localized and fragmented (to the detriment of global and integrative) processing of information. This pattern of learning is thought to lead to deficits in aspects of perception (e.g., face processing), cognition, and communication (e.g., focus on disjointed details rather than gist or context), ultimately leading to social impairments. This study was carried out to examine whether WCC applies to social and to non-social aspects of learning alike, or, alternatively, some areas of learning (e.g., physical reasoning) are spared in autism. classic social animation as quantified in the Social Attribution Task (SAT) () and a novel animation involving physical reasoning (the Physical Attribution Task; PAT) were used to test the domain specificity of the WCC hypothesis. A pilot study involving a reference group of typically developing young adults and a group of individuals with higher-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) revealed gender differences in the reference group in regards to performance on the PAT (males outperformed females). In a follow-up case-control comparison involving only males where the ASD group was matched on age and IQ to a typically developing (TD) group of children, adolescents, and adults, the ASD group showed lower SAT scores and comparable PAT scores relative to the TD group. The interaction of diagnostic group by task was highly significant, with little overlap between the groups in the distributions of SAT minus PAT scores. These results indicated preserved integrative skills in the area of physical attribution in the ASD group, thus failing to support the WCC account as a domain-independent (or more general) model of learning in autism, while highlighting the centrality of the social deficits in the characterization of learning style in the autism spectrum disorders.

Cortical integration of audio-visual speech and non-speech stimuli

Using fMRI we investigated the neural basis of audio-visual processing of speech and non-speech stimuli using physically similar auditory stimuli (speech and sinusoidal tones) and visual stimuli (animated circles and ellipses). Relative to uni-modal stimuli, the different multi-modal stimuli showed increased activation in largely non-overlapping areas. Ellipse-Speech, which most resembles naturalistic audio-visual speech, showed higher activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus, fusiform gyri, left posterior superior temporal sulcus, and lateral occipital cortex. Circle-Tone, an arbitrary audio-visual pairing with no speech association, activated middle temporal gyri and lateral occipital cortex. Circle-Speech showed activation in lateral occipital cortex, and Ellipse-Tone did not show increased activation relative to uni-modal stimuli. Further analysis revealed that middle temporal regions, although identified as multi-modal only in the Circle-Tone condition, were more strongly active to Ellipse-Speech or Circle-Speech, but regions that were identified as multi-modal for Ellipse-Speech were always strongest for Ellipse-Speech. Our results suggest that combinations of auditory and visual stimuli may together be processed by different cortical networks, depending on the extent to which multi-modal speech or non-speech percepts are evoked.