Journal
JOURNAL OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY
Volume 50, Issue 5, Pages 637-642Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC
DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.02051.x
Keywords
Infancy; autism; visual attention; gap-overlap task; disengagement
Categories
Funding
- Medical Research Council [G9715587]
- Autism Speaks [1292/MJ/01-201-006-065-00-00, 06/MRE02/73]
- Medical Research Council [G0800054, G9715587, G0701484] Funding Source: researchfish
- MRC [G0800054, G9715587, G0701484] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Recent studies of infant siblings of children diagnosed with autism have allowed for a prospective approach to examine the emergence of symptoms and revealed behavioral differences in the broader autism phenotype within the early years. In the current study we focused on a set of functions associated with visual attention, previously reported to be atypical in autism. We compared performance of a group of 9-10-month-old infant siblings of children with autism to a control group with no family history of autism on the 'gap-overlap task', which measures the cost of disengaging from a central stimulus in order to fixate a peripheral one. Two measures were derived on the basis of infants' saccadic reaction times. The first is the Disengagement effect, which measures the efficiency of disengaging from a central stimulus to orient to a peripheral one. The second was a Facilitation effect, which arises when the infant is cued by a temporal gap preceding the onset of the peripheral stimulus, and would orient faster after its onset. Infant siblings of children with autism showed longer Disengagement latencies as well as less Facilitation relative to the control group. The findings are discussed in relation to how differences in visual attention may relate to characteristics observed in autism and the broader phenotype.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available