Is It Fear? Similar Brain Responses to Fearful and Neutral Faces in Infants with a Heightened Likelihood for Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Renata Di Lorenzo, Nicolette M Munsters, Emma K Ward and 3 others
PMID 32594334WHAT IT FOUND
Infants with a family history of autism showed no difference from controls in general visual processing.
However, unlike controls, they did not distinguish fearful from neutral faces when shown detailed images, suggesting early differences in how they process facial expressions.
Key findings
01There was no significant difference between infants with a heightened likelihood for autism and control infants in general spatial frequency processing at the P100, N290, or P400 brain components.
02Control infants showed a brain response difference between fearful and neutral faces when images contained high spatial frequency details, but infants with a heightened likelihood for autism did not show this discrimination.
03The study did not have diagnostic outcome data for the infants, so results cannot be interpreted as early signs of autism, as only a subset of the high-likelihood group will develop the condition.
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 have long-term diagnostic outcomes for the infants, so it is unknown which participants developed autism. The sample size was small (38 infants), which limits the ability to detect subtle effects. The study only tested fearful versus neutral expressions, so results cannot be generalized to other emotions. The visual stimuli were digitally filtered and did not resemble real-life faces. Many findings regarding expression processing were exploratory and not corrected for multiple comparisons.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking EU-AIMS, H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret these brain responses as a diagnostic marker for autism. The study lacked follow-up data on which infants actually developed the condition, and the observed differences were subtle and exploratory, meaning they cannot currently be used to identify individuals at risk.