THE PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT

Autism spectrum disorders are childhood onset conditions characterized by impairments in social communication and repetitive, stereotyped behavior.  Currently, no effective medical treatment is available; consequently, the field of psychology plays an important role in generating new knowledge in this area. Particularly, it is believed to be pivotal to understand the early development of autism – during the first years of life.
This research project aimed to improve our understanding of attentional factors in autism. In particular, it focused on the ability to detect and orient to movement patterns from other humans and animals (biological motion), the ability to detect and orient to multisensory contingencies (e.g., audiovisual synchrony), as well as the ability to share attentional focus with other people (joint attention). All of these areas are of considerable theoretical relevance for our understanding of the emergence of autistic symptoms early in life.

THE PROJECT’S THREE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS

1) We have shown that young children with autism spectrum disorder neither orient to biological motion nor audiovisual synchrony. Specifically in one study, we found that young children with the disorder were significantly less sensitive to both these types of information than typically developing control children. These results do not agree with a previous frequently cited study, which concluded that children with autism are particularly inclined to orient to audiovisual synchrony. The contrast between the two studies underlines the importance of investigating this issue more in the future. In particular, it will be important to study these issues in a longitudinal design of infants at risk for autism, to find out if infants with later autism are characterized by hypo- or hypersensitivity to audiovisual synchrony. We are currently addressing this question in a follow-up study of infant siblings of children with autism.

2) Regarding joint attention, we have shown that despite their general inability to orient to biological motion (point 1), children with autism are able to follow other people’s gaze – allowing them to attend to the same things as other people. This suggests that sensitivity to biological motion and the ability to follow gaze are not reflecting the same underlying psychological mechanism.

3) We have developed a new method for analyzing eye movements when children follow others’ gaze – and with this method we have demonstrated subtle differences in how children with typical development and children with autism acquire information in communicative contexts.

NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS GENERATED BY THE PROJECT

The study has generated several new research questions, projects and collaborations. In particular, we have been able to expand the project to include infants at risk for autism, ADHD and language disorders via later grants from national (among them RJ) and international sponsors. These new spin-off projects will not only allow us to illuminate developmental processes that occur before the emergence of symptoms, but also to clarify which of the early signs are found across several diagnoses, and which are diagnosis specific.  This is of great theoretical as well as practical interest.

INTERNATIONALIZATION

The project concerns basic question about psychological characteristics in autism – characteristics which presumably are universal. The project is a part of, or has close collaboration with, several international networks, including the EU-IMI network EU-AIMS (https://www.eu-aims.eu/), the EU-COST network ESSEA (http://www.cost-essea.com/), and the EUMSC network BRAINVIEW (http://www.brainview.org/); the PI has an active role in all these networks. In addition, the project has generated new collaborations between universities in Sweden and Birkbeck, and between the University of London and the University of Washington.

COMMUNICATION WITH THE WIDER AUDIENCE

The coworkers of the project have participated several times in communication and outreach activities including writing scientific descriptions in popular magazines for parent organizations, participating in TV interviews (http://www.tv4.se/nyhetsmorgon/klipp/ny-%C3%B6gonteknik-ska-uppt%C3%A4cka-autism-3080712), as well as arranging seminar series for professionals working with autism.

THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS FROM THE PROJECT

In addition to the findings described above, we want to highlight two articles which have had particular impact:

Falck-Ytter, T., Bölte, S., & Gredebäck, G. (2013). Eye tracking in early autism research. Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, 5(28). doi: 10.1186/10.1186/1866-1955-5-28. This publication, in which we described much of the theoretical background of the current proposal, is currently among the 5 most accessed articles from this journal.  (23,500 accesses, March 2017).

Falck-Ytter, T., Carlström, C., & Johansson, M. (2015). Eye contact modulates cognitive processing differently in children with autism. Child Development. 86, 37-47. 10.1111/cdev.12273. In this article, we presented a new method for studying eye movements in children with autism while they were interacting with another person. This was a considerable improvement in comparison with the vast majority of earlier eye tracking studies, which have presented stimuli on a computer screen.

PUBLICATION STRATEGY

All scientific results have been published in international scientific, peer-reviewed journals with open access.

FUTURE PUBLICATIONS

We continuously present new papers here:
http://www.smasyskon.se/sv/publikationer.php?lang=sv