autism-social interaction finding

Yale researchers make autism-social interaction finding

Two-year-olds with autism lack an important building block of social interaction that prompts newborn babies to pay attention to other people. Instead, these children pay attention to physical relationships between movement and sound and miss critical social information. Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine report their results in the March 29 online issue of Nature.

"Human infants are born in a fragile state. They are entirely dependent on their caregivers for survival, and so it makes sense that infants would possess very early-emerging predispositions to seek their caregivers, to pay special attention to movements in the environment that are associated with human actions and gestures," said Ami Klin, director of the Autism Program at Yale and the Harris Associate Professor of Child Psychology at the Yale Child Study Center.

Klin, who conducted the study with research scientist Warren Jones and colleagues at Yale, said that two-year-olds with autism showed no signs of this selective attention to these types of human movements. Instead, the children with autism focused on a different environmental cue: they paid attention only to movements that were physically synchronous with sounds.

"Rather than attending to human biological motion, and the social cues in that motion," said Klin, "children with autism were very sensitive to non-social information: to synchronies between sounds and motion in what they were watching."

Klin, Jones and colleagues tracked the eye movements of two-year-olds with and without autism while they watched cartoon animations. The animations were created with a technique borrowed from the video game industry in which movements of real people are recorded and then used to animate characters. In this case, the body movements were recreated as points of light on a black background, with one point of light at each joint in the body.

"The eye-tracking data revealed that typically-developing two-year-olds perceived human motion in these moving points of light. They saw people," said Jones. "But children with autism were insensitive to the socially relevant cues in that motion, and they focused instead on physical cues that typically-developing children disregarded."

Previous studies by the Yale team have shown that when looking at other people, toddlers with autism looked less at eyes and more at mouths. "The current results suggest something very important about that earlier research," said Klin. "Rather than looking at the social cues expressed in people's eyes, two-year-olds with autism may be paying attention, as in the current study, to synchronies between sound and motion. So rather than the eyes, they are focusing on the synchrony between lip motion and speech sounds."

"This suggests that from very early in life, children with autism are seeking experiences in the physical rather than the social world, and this in turn has far-reaching implications for the development of social mind and brain," said Jones.

The Yale group is now using this finding in their work with infant siblings of children with autism who are at greater genetic risk of also developing autism. "Because this mechanism emerges in the first days of life for typical children, we hope to use similar techniques to identify early signs of vulnerability in autism. This could be an aid for early diagnosis, which in turn allows for early intervention to maximize positive outcomes for these children," said Klin.

The next step is to study this phenomenon at earlier stages of development, and to combine the behavioral work with simultaneous neuroimaging through collaboration with another Yale colleague, Kevin Pelphrey.

《中英對照讀新聞》Cartoons could help spot autism 卡通有助發現自閉症

◎鄭寺音

Watching how a toddler responds to animations could help diagnose autism, research has suggested.

研究顯示，觀察幼兒如何回應動畫，有助診斷自閉症。

Babies usually start paying attention to movement soon after birth, and pick up information from the cues they see but children with autism often do not.

嬰兒出生後不久，通常會開始注意動作，也會從看到的線索之中取得資訊，不過有自閉症的孩童通常不會這樣。

A study, published in Nature, where two-year-olds were shown manipulated animations found those with autism focussed on movement linked to sound.

刊登於自然期刊的一項研究，讓兩歲孩童觀看被處理過的動畫，發現自閉症孩童，專注於與聲音相關的動作。

In the Yale study, researchers created five versions of animated children’s games, each with sound. On the other half of the screen, the same animation was presented upside down and in reverse, but with the same audio as the upright version.

在這項耶魯研究中，研究人員設計了5種孩童遊戲的動畫版本，每種都有聲音。螢幕的另一半畫面，同樣的動畫被上下、正反顛倒地播放，不過聲音與直立的版本相同。

Previous studies have shown that, normally, children’s attention is drawn to such changes from around eight months old.

過去的研究發現，通常大約8個月以上的孩童，注意力會受到這種改變吸引。

Twenty-one toddlers with autistic-spectrum disorders （ASD）, 39 who were developing normally and 16 who had developmental problems but did not have autism were studied.

21名有泛自閉症障礙症候群（ASD）的幼兒、39名發育正常的幼兒、16名有發育問題但沒有自閉症的幼兒接受研究。

Both the toddlers who were developing normally and those with developmental problems showed a clear preference for looking at the upright animations. However the toddlers with ASD showed no preference and looked backwards and forwards between the two halves of the screen.

發育正常以及有發育問題的幼兒，明顯偏好注視直立動畫；但自閉症幼兒無此偏好，而是會來回觀看兩邊螢幕。

新聞辭典

spot：動詞，找到、發現。例句：If you spot any mistakes in the article just mark them with a pencil.（如果你在文章裡發現錯誤，就用鉛筆畫出來。）

preference：名詞，偏好。

backwards and forwards ：片語，來回地。例句：Paul paced anxiously backwards and forwards.（保羅緊張地來回踱步。）