Archival ReportSpeech Disturbs Face Scanning in 6-Month-Old Infants Who Develop Autism Spectrum Disorder
Section snippets
Participants
Participants (n = 122) were enrolled in a prospective study of face processing and comprised both younger siblings of children with ASD (HR; n = 68) and infants who had no family history of ASD in any first- or second-degree relatives (LR; n = 54). In HR infants, the diagnosis of the older sibling was confirmed by clinical best estimate together with the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-G (66) and/or Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (67). In LR infants, family history was ascertained
Looking at the Scene
Analysis of %Scene indicated a group difference (F3,92.0 = 4.16, p = .008) but no condition (p = .656) or group × condition interaction (p = .620). Infants later diagnosed with ASD looked less at the scene as a whole as compared with HR-ATYP (p = .006, Cohen's d = 1.01) and LR-TYP (p = .004, d = 1.19) infants and showed a trend to look less than HR-TYP infants (p = .083, d = .56) (Figure 2A; Figure S1 Row 1 in Supplement 1).
Looking at Inner Features of the Face
Analysis of %Inner showed no main effects of group (p = .533) or
Discussion
The key findings of this study are that 6-month-old infants who later develop ASD show marked reductions in attention toward both static and dynamic faces and, when they do attend to faces, look less at the socially informative inner features. However, although the former deficit does not seem to be condition-specific, diminished attention to the key facial features was found only in response to a face that was speaking. Despite these deficits, infants later diagnosed with ASD show an
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