Brief Report: A Preference for Biological Motion Predicts a Reduction in Symptom Severity 1 Year Later in Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Recent research has consistently demonstrated reduced orienting to social stimuli in samples of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, social orienting greatly varies between individual children on the spectrum. Better understanding this heterogeneity in social orienting may contribute to our comprehension of the mechanisms underlying autistic symptoms thereby improving our ability to intervene. Indeed, children on the autism spectrum who show higher levels of interest in social stimuli demonstrate reduced clinical symptoms and increased adaptive functioning. However, longitudinal studies examining the influence of social orienting on subsequent outcome are critically lacking. Here, we aim to explore the relationship between social interest at the age of 3 and changes in severity of autistic symptoms over the subsequent year, in 20 children with ASD and 20 age-matched typically developing (TD) children. A visual preference for social stimuli was measured using an eye-tracking task at baseline, consisting of a previously studied visual preference paradigm presenting biological and geometric motion side-by-side. The task was altered for the current study by alternating presentation side for each type of stimuli to keep visual perseveration from influencing participants’ first fixation location. Clinical data were collected both at baseline and 1 year later at follow-up. As a group, we observed reduced interest for biological motion (BIO-M) in children with ASD compared to TD children, corroborating previous findings. We also confirmed that a preference for BIO-M is associated with better adaptive functioning in preschoolers with ASD. Most importantly, our longitudinal results showed that a preference for BIO-M strongly predicted decreased severity of diagnostic symptoms. Participants who preferred social stimuli at the age of 3 showed drastic reductions in their severity level of autistic symptoms 1 year later, whereas participants who preferred geometric stimuli showed autistic symptoms that were unchanged or more severe after 1 year. As a whole, our results suggest that a preference for BIO-M may be key to understanding the behavioral phenotype of young children with ASD, and may represent a promising candidate behavior for predicting early developmental trajectories and outcome.

Human and monkey infant attention to dynamic social and nonsocial stimuli

“…For example, at 2 months, infants who later go on to develop ASD show similar patterns of social attention to infants without ASD, but between 2 and 6 months, only infants with ASD display declines in attention to the eyes (Jones & Klin, 2013). Similarly, 6‐month‐old infants who are later diagnosed with ASD, compared to typically developing children, attend less to a dynamic social scene (Chawarska, Macari, & Shic, 2013), and 14‐ to 51‐month‐olds with ASD attend longer to a nonsocial dynamic geometric pattern than a concurrently presented social video, while typically developing toddlers looked more instead to the social video (Franchini et al., 2016; Pierce et al., 2011, 2016). Together, these studies uncover the need to better understand the development of social attention in infancy, laying the foundation for more complex, higher‐level social abilities that emerge later in development.…”

Study protocol of the multi-centre, randomized controlled trial of the Frankfurt Early Intervention Program A-FFIP versus early intervention as usual for toddlers and preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (A-FFIP study)

“…This also will be done in the present study. In addition, the objective measures implemented, such as eye-tracking and objective movement parameters are unique, and will provide important additional information on "what works for whom" [37]. This may also allow to partly explain the variability in outcomes of early intervention trials.…”

“…social attention) is a well replicated finding in children with ASD [40]. Visual orienting preference for biological motion in pre-schoolers with ASD predicted symptom reduction after one year [37]. In an fMRI study with 6-year-old children, pre-treatment levels of neural activity in response to biological vs scrambled motion in four distinct brain regions predicted intervention outcome of a 16-weeks NDBI (7hrs/week) [41].…”

“…Recent innovative eye-tracking and body-movement analysis studies aim at objectively measuring sensory perception [35], visual orienting preferences [36,37], and imitation abilities [38]. Perception, attention, and imitation impairments are likely to underlie core autistic symptoms [7].…”

Early alterations of large-scale brain networks temporal dynamics in young children with autism

“…Five minutes of spontaneous EEG recordings were acquired for all the participants included in the study. All participants were recruited as a part of the Geneva Autism Cohort, a longitudinal cohort of young children (Robain et al, 2020;Franchini et al, 2016). Toddlers and preschoolers were included in the ASD group if the previously established clinical diagnosis was confirmed by exceeding the threshold limit for ASD on ADOS-G (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Generic) (Lord et al, 2000) or ADOS-2 (Second version) (Lord et al, 2012).…”