Objective To examine patterns of variability in social visual engagement and their relationship to standardized measures of social disability in a heterogeneous sample of school-age children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Method Eye-tracking measures of visual fixation during free-viewing of dynamic social scenes were obtained for 109 children with ASD (mean age=10.2 ± 3.2 years), 37 of whom were matched to 26 typically developing (TD) children (mean age=9.5 ± 2.2 years) on gender, age and IQ. The smaller subset allowed for between-group comparisons whereas the larger group was used for within-group examinations of ASD heterogeneity. Results Between-group comparisons revealed significantly attenuated orientation to socially salient aspects of the scenes, with the largest effect size (Cohen’s d=1.5) obtained for reduced fixation on faces. Within-group analyses revealed a robust association between higher fixation on the inanimate environment and greater social disability. However, the associations between fixation on the eyes and mouth and social adaptation varied greatly, even reversing, when comparing different cognitive profile subgroups. Conclusions While patterns of social visual engagement with naturalistic social stimuli are profoundly altered in children with ASD, the social adaptivity of these behaviors varies for different groups of children. This variation likely represents different patterns of adaptation and maladaptation that should be traced longitudinally to the first years of life, before complex interactions between early predispositions and compensatory learning take place. We propose that variability in these early mechanisms of socialization may serve as proximal behavioral manifestations of genetic vulnerabilities.

Episodic memory shows striking improvement during early childhood. However, neural contributions to these behavioral changes are not well understood. The present study examined associations between episodic memory and volume of subregions (head, body, tail) of the hippocampus—a structure known to support episodic memory in school-aged children and adults—during early childhood (n=45). Results revealed significant positive relations between episodic memory and volume of the hippocampal head in both the left and right hemispheres for 6- but not 4-year-old children, suggesting brain-behavior relations vary across development. These findings add new information regarding neural mechanisms of change in memory development during early childhood and suggest developmental differences in hippocampal subregions may contribute to age-related differences in episodic memory ability.

A B S T R A C TAccording to attachment theory (e.g., Bowlby, 1969Bowlby, /1982Bowlby, , 1973Bowlby, , 1980, infants develop cognitive models (termed internal working models, IWMs) of their attachment figures during the first year of life. Bowlby proposed his initial thinking about IWMs as more of an outline than a fully defined concept (Bretherton & Munholland, 2008). As such, considerable subsequent theoretical and empirical works have aimed to increase understanding of how IWMs operate (e.g., Bretherton & Munholland, 2008;Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). To date, however, relatively little research has explored infant cognition with respect to the development of the IWM. In this review, we summarize the IWM concept as it applies to caregiver-specific attachment representations in infancy, review research examining cognitive capacities relevant to building these caregiver-specific representations, and provide directions for future research. We bridge social and cognitive developmental literatures and suggest ways in which researchers can continue to examine these representations. Both attachment researchers and social cognitive researchers can learn from each others' theoretical models and methodologies to understand development at the intersection of social, emotional, and cognitive development in infancy.

Mounting evidence suggests that social interaction changes how communicative behaviors (e.g., spoken language, gaze) are processed, but the precise neural bases by which social-interactive context may alter communication remain unknown. Various perspectives suggest that live interactions are more rewarding, more attention-grabbing, or require increased mentalizing-thinking about the thoughts of others. Dissociating between these possibilities is difficult because most extant neuroimaging paradigms examining social interaction have not directly compared live paradigms to conventional "offline" (or recorded) paradigms. We developed a novel fMRI paradigm to assess whether and how an interactive context changes the processing of speech matched in content and vocal characteristics. Participants listened to short vignettes--which contained no reference to people or mental states--believing that some vignettes were prerecorded and that others were presented over a real-time audio-feed by a live social partner. In actuality, all speech was prerecorded. Simply believing that speech was live increased activation in each participant's own mentalizing regions, defined using a functional localizer. Contrasting live to recorded speech did not reveal significant differences in attention or reward regions. Further, higher levels of autistic-like traits were associated with altered neural specialization for live interaction. These results suggest that humans engage in ongoing mentalizing about social partners, even when such mentalizing is not explicitly required, illustrating how social context shapes social cognition. Understanding communication in social context has important implications for typical and atypical social processing, especially for disorders like autism where social difficulties are more acute in live interaction.

Theory of mind (ToM)--or thinking about the mental states of others--is a cornerstone of successful everyday social interaction. However, the brain bases of ToM are most frequently measured via explicit laboratory tasks that pose direct questions about mental states (e.g. "In this story, what does Steve think Julia believes?"). Neuroanatomical measures may provide a way to explore the brain bases of individual differences in more naturalistic everyday mentalizing. In the current study, we examined the relation between cortical thickness and spontaneous ToM using the novel Spontaneous Theory of Mind Protocol (STOMP), which measures participants' spontaneous descriptions of the beliefs, emotions and goals of characters in naturalistic videos. We administered standard ToM tasks and the STOMP to young adults (aged 18-26 years) and collected structural magnetic resonance imaging data from a subset of these participants. The STOMP produced robust individual variability and was correlated with performance on traditional ToM tasks. Further, unlike the traditional ToM tasks, STOMP performance was related to cortical thickness for a set of brain regions that have been functionally linked to ToM processing. These findings offer novel insight into the brain bases of variability in naturalistic mentalizing performance, with implications for both typical and atypical populations.