Shifting Preferences for Primate Faces in Neurotypical Infants and Infants Later Diagnosed With ASD.
Amy Yamashiro, Andrea Sorcinelli, Tazmin Rahman and 3 others
PMID 30561908WHAT IT FOUND
Infants later diagnosed with ASD looked longer at human faces than non-faces at 6 months, unlike neurotypical infants, who also looked longer at monkey faces.
The ASD group's preference for primate faces declined by 18 months. This is an eye-tracking pattern, not a clinical screen.
Key findings
01At 6 months, both groups looked longer at human faces than human non-faces, but neurotypical infants looked longer at monkey faces than monkey non-faces while infants later diagnosed with ASD looked equally at monkey faces and monkey non-faces.
02Modeling change over time showed that infants later diagnosed with ASD had a greater downturn in preference for primate faces from 6 to 18 months. Their preference plateaued between 6 and 9 months and reached preference scores close to 0 by 18 months.
03When human and monkey faces were shown side by side, neurotypical infants looked longer at both primate faces at 9 months than infants later diagnosed with ASD, while the difference over time just missed conventional significance criteria.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The final analyzed samples were much smaller than the infants tested: Experiment 1 analyzed 58 infants and Experiment 2 analyzed 31 infants, so the findings may not be stable. Many eye-tracking records were excluded for fussiness, inattention, experimenter error, or inefficient data collection, so the analyzed groups may not represent all infants. The studies did not test an intervention or a diagnostic tool, so they cannot show that looking patterns cause ASD or can be used clinically. The ASD group in Experiment 2 had 7 infants, so the finding rests on a small number. The high-risk group was defined by having an older sibling with ASD, and not all high-risk infants developed ASD; among neurotypical infants, low-risk and high-risk groups did not differ over time. The possible link to social-communicative development is an interpretation in the Discussion, not a measured outcome.
Declared interests
The article text supplied does not include a conflict-of-interest or funding declaration. The publication types list NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat reduced looking at monkey faces or a downturn in face-looking as an early ASD screen or a therapy target. These are group-level eye-tracking differences in small final samples, not a validated diagnostic marker.