Sex Differences in Social Attention in Infants at Risk for Autism

We studied visual attention to emotional faces in 10-month-old infant siblings of children with ASD (ASD-sibs; N = 70) and a siblings of typically developing children (N = 29) using static stimuli. Contrary to our predictions, we found no evidence for atypical gaze behavior in ASD-sibs when boys and girls were analyzed together. However, a sex difference was found in ASD-sibs' visual attention to the mouth. Male ASD-sibs looked more at the mouth across emotions compared to male controls and female ASD-sibs. In contrast, female ASD-sibs looked less at the mouth compared to female controls. These findings suggest that some aspects of early emerging atypical social attention in ASD-sibs may be sex specific

Visual completion and complexity of visual shape in children with pervasive developmental disorder

Contains fulltext : 55956.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Much evidence has been gathered for differences in visual perceptual processing in individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. The presence of the fundamental process of visual completion was tested in a group of children with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), as this requires perceptually integrating visual structure into wholes. In Experiment 1, it was investigated whether visual completion is present for simple partly occluded shapes in a group of children with PDD and a typically developing group. In Experiment 2, the presence of contextual influences in visual completion was investigated for the two groups. A total of 19 children with PDD and 28 controls who were matched for chronological age and IQ took part in two primed-matching tasks. For both groups, visual completion was present and for both groups, contextual influences were found to be dominant in this process. However, only for the group with PDD no priming effects (PEs) were found from less regular primes on congruent test pairs. The group with PDD did integrate visual information into wholes and did this in a contextually dependent way. However, for more complex shapes, visual completion is weaker for this group.10 p

Motor, emotional, and cognitive empathy in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and conduct disorder

It is unclear which aspects of empathy are shared and which are uniquely affected in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and conduct disorder (CD) as are the neurobiological correlates of these empathy impairments. The aim of this systematic review is to describe the overlap and specificity of motor, emotional, and cognitive aspects of empathy in children and adolescents with ASD or CD. Motor and cognitive empathy impairments are found in both ASD and CD, yet the specificity seems to differ. In ASD facial mimicry and emotion recognition may be impaired for all basic emotions, whereas in CD this is only the case for negative emotions. Emotional empathy and the role of attention to the eyes therein need further investigation. We hypothesize that impaired motor and cognitive empathy in both disorders are a consequence of lack of attention to the eyes. However, we hypothesize major differences in emotional empathy deficits between ASD and CD, probably due to emotional autonomic and amygdala hyper-responsivity in ASD versus hypo-responsivity in CD, both resulting in lack of attention to the eyes