Dysfunctions in Infants' Statistical Learning are Related to Parental Autistic Traits.
Bettoni Roberta, Valentina Riva, Chiara Cantiani and 4 others
PMID 33582879WHAT IT FOUND
Seven-month-old infants whose parents had high autistic traits showed no ability to distinguish structured visual patterns from random ones, unlike infants of parents with low traits.
This suggests early statistical learning difficulties may track with parental autism characteristics before any diagnosis.
Key findings
01Infants of parents with low autistic traits successfully discriminated between familiar structured shape sequences and novel random sequences, looking longer at the novel patterns.
02Infants of parents with high autistic traits showed no significant discrimination between the structured and random visual sequences, despite having normal habituation times and cognitive scores.
03Across the whole sample, higher parental autistic traits were associated with lower infant visual statistical learning ability.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study did not follow up with the infants to confirm whether they later developed autism or other developmental conditions, so it cannot predict individual outcomes. The sample size was relatively small, and the group assignment relied solely on parental self-report of autistic traits rather than clinical diagnosis. Only one infant in the high-trait group had both parents scoring high, preventing analysis of whether having two parents with high traits compounds the effect. The statistical learning task used abstract visual shapes, so it is unclear if these findings generalize to learning patterns in speech or social interactions.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the Italian Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, University and Research, and the University of Milano-Bicocca. No commercial conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of statistical learning in the high-trait group as evidence that these infants have autism or will develop it. The infants were healthy and cognitively typical at baseline, and the study measured a cognitive process associated with parental traits, not a clinical diagnosis.