Autistic Kids Respond Better to Visual Cues Accompanied by Sounds

Children with autism do not pick up visual cues like others who are non-autistic or learning delayed, unless those images are in sync with accompanying sounds. This may explain why autistic children tend to focus on the mouth (the center of movement in the face) rather than the eyes of those who are speaking, as well as give some insight into why autistic children become less and less responsive to social interaction over time.

So says Ami Klin, a researcher at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who, along with his colleagues compared the response of autistic and non-autistic children to visual animations. Klin found that the non-autistic and developmentally delayed children showed a clear preference for images that were upright versus upside down, but autistic children seemed to show no indication that they noticed either way. However, when they reviewed the data, they noted that during periods in which the image was accompanied by some sort of synchronized sound, such as clapping, the autistic toddlers showed a definite interest, whether the image was right-side-up or reversed.

Klin speculates that this tendency to associate visual cues with sound may contribute and even exaggerate learning and social difficulties in autistic children, causing them to misinterpret or even entirely miss important social cues that are necessary for survival. Without an ability to separate visual from aural input, those with autism are unable to learn the meaning behind common facial expressions and over time will not understand the intentions of those in their environment.

Kiln said that he will now explore how this newfound knowledge can be put to use by help direct autistic children’s focus to relevant information. The researchers are also going to use their findings to develop screening tests for autism that can be performed at an earlier age and increase the possibility of early intervention.

However, an autism researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada Lonnie Zwaigenbaum, noted that the research is in its infancy, and it will probably take some time to transform the findings into a workable, scientific tool.






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Parental Age and Birth Order May Effect Autism

A new study suggests that parental age and order of birth may have huge effects on whether or not a child is born with autism. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta funded the study, which was led by Dr. Maureen Durkin and colleagues from the University Of Wisconsin School Of Medicine. The study was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, which is a peer-reviewed medical journal.

The researchers analyzed birth data and records from over 250,000 births from 1994, identified over 2,000 children diagnosed with autism by 2002, and then looked at many different factors to find patterns and likelihoods in birth order and parental age. Researchers obtained information from the National Center for Health Statistics, but unfortunately could only find birth information for 1,251 of the children diagnosed with autism. This amount ended up being 58 percent of the actual cases.

Regardless of limited birth information, the study identified that women over age 35 are 30 percent more likely to have an autistic child than women aged 25-29, and males over 40 years old are 40 percent more likely to have an autistic child than younger men. When this older parental age is coupled with the child being the first born for both parents, the chances of bearing an autistic child were nearly tripled.

It is worth noting that the researchers made adjustments for other factors that could have affected the results, such as gestational age, gender, multiple birth, maternal ethnicity and birth weight, thought they did not adjust for psychopathology of parents or infertility treatments. The researchers also noted that older parents may be more likely to notice developmental disorders in their children, and therefore seek diagnosis more often than parents of a younger age.

This case-cohort study is the first large study to show this much evidence that maternal age, paternal age, and birth order may greatly affect the chances of autism in children. Although evidence is strong, there is still not enough solid evidence to make a concrete conclusion, and researchers are hoping to hold larger, longer, more in-depth studies that can back up the evidence found so far.





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