Spotting autism in toddlers

Eyes may redflag autism

Scientists at Yale School of Medicine have found that 2 year olds with autism look significantly more at the mouths of others, and less at their eyes, than typically developing toddlers – and they say this tendency may predict how severely a child is affected by autism.

Researchers used eye-tracking technology to quantify the visual fixations of 2 year olds who watched caregivers approach them and engage in typical mother-child interactions, such as playing peek-a-boo.

After the first few weeks of life, babies look into the eyes of others, setting processes of socialization in motion. In infancy and throughout life, the act of looking at the eyes of others is a window into people's feelings and thoughts and a powerful facilitator in shaping the formation of the social mind and brain. The scientists found that the amount of time toddlers spent focused on the eyes predicted their level of social disability – the less they focused on the eyes, the more severely disabled they were.

These results may offer a useful means of screening for autism and assessing how severe it is early in life. “The findings offer hope that these novel methods will enable the detection of vulnerabilities for autism in infancy,” say lead author of the study Warren Jones, a research scientist at Yale School of Medicine’s Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program and the Yale Child Study Center. “We hope this technology can be used to detect and measure signs of an emerging social disability, potentially improving a child's outcome.”

Study collaborator Ami Klin, director of the Autism Program at the Child Study Center, says they are now using this technology in a large prospective study of the younger siblings of children with autism, who are at greater risk of also developing the condition. “By following babies at risk of autism monthly from the time they are born, we hope to trace the origins of social engagement in human infants and to detect the first signs of derailment from the normative path,” she says. “These children may be seeing faces in terms of their physical attributes alone – watching a face without necessarily experiencing it as an engaging partner sharing in a social interaction.”

The study is published in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

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