Autism at a glance: A pilot study optimizing thin-slice observations.
Lauren H Hampton, Philip R Curtis, Megan Y Roberts
PMID 30114932WHAT IT FOUND
Short 2-minute play videos rated by five people produced stable scores linked to autism severity and language.
The method was not ready to identify autism on its own.
Key findings
01The short video ratings became stable when five raters scored two play contexts.
02The optimized score related to autism severity and language measures, and did not meaningfully relate to age or socioeconomic status.
03The score had moderate positive and negative predictive values for distinguishing autism from developmental language disorder.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The children with autism had subtle symptoms and did not flag on a level-2 screening measure at intake, so the results may not apply to more obvious cases. The raters were speech-language pathology students or research staff with experience coding child behavior, so less experienced clinicians may not get the same stability. The study was a retrospective pilot that used archived videos and 20 toddlers in each group, not a prospective screening study. Stability varied across contexts, and Study 2 used different contexts from Study 1, so the measure needs replication. The authors say the positive predictive value is not high enough to recommend using the score as a screener alone.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use the thin-slice score as a stand-alone autism screen. The paper reports it is preliminary, the positive predictive value was .70, and the authors say it is not high enough to recommend use alone.