Sex Differences in Social Attention in Infants at Risk for Autism.
Johan Lundin Kleberg, Pär Nyström, Sven Bölte and 1 others
PMID 30467821WHAT IT FOUND
At 10 months, infant siblings of autistic children did not differ from controls in overall looking at eyes or mouth of happy and fearful faces.
The pattern differed by sex: male siblings looked more at mouths than male controls, female siblings less than female controls.
Key findings
01The expected difference between siblings and controls in looking at happy versus fearful faces was not significant for mouth looking or the eye-mouth index.
02Male infant siblings of children with autism looked more at the mouth than male controls, while female siblings looked less at the mouth than female controls.
03In controls, more looking at the eyes was related to lower concurrent expressive language; no such relation was found in siblings.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The control group was small (29 infants), so sex differences and null findings may be unstable. This report did not use later diagnosis to explain the looking patterns. Sex was added to analyses without an a priori hypothesis, so sex differences are exploratory. Infants watched static pictures of emotional faces, not real social interaction. Some infants were excluded for poor eye-tracking data or outlier scores. The sample was limited to full-term infants without confirmed or suspected medical problems, including vision or hearing problems.
Declared interests
Funding was from Vetenskapsrådet, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and Strategic Research Area Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet (StratNeuro). The supplied text lists no author conflict-of-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that infant siblings of autistic children have a general face-scanning deficit or that mouth-looking predicts autism risk. The overall group differences were not significant, and the sex differences were exploratory and not linked to later diagnosis in this report.