Teodora Gliga & The BASIS teamBirkbeck, University of London
Date: TODAY, June 10, 2013, 5 PM
Location: Cognitive Development Center, Hattyś u. 14, 3rd floor
Title: Typical social orienting and social motivation in infants at-risk for ASD
Abstract: Developmental theories of autism can be broadly divided into those that see the social and communication difficulties specific of ASD as emerging from impairments in *understanding* the functions of social interaction (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985; Gliga et al, 2012) and those that propose they stem from an inability to *orient* to or *attend* to socially relevant information (Dawson et al., 2004; Chevalier at al, 2012). According to the second account diminished early "social" orienting biases, for example, will limit the exposure to social interaction and have cascading effects on learning from and about people. Prospective studies of infants at-risk for ASD (because of having an older sibling with the disorder) offer the ideal testing ground for these hypotheses. I will review emerging findings from BASIS (but also from other groups) investigating the ability to orient to and engage with a variety of "social" stimuli, during the first year of life. In brief, there is little evidence for difficulties with orienting to faces, eyes or human actions or for decreased motivation to attend to social interaction, in infants that later developed symptoms of ASD. "Disinterest" in social interaction emerges later in the second year of life and maybe therefore secondary to difficulties with processing (social) information.
* The BASIS Team in alphabetical order: R. Bedford, S. Baron-Cohen, P. Bolton, S. Chandler, T. Charman, K. Davies, M. Elsabbagh, J. Fernandes, H. Garwood, K. Hudry, M. Johnson, A. Pickles. L. Tucker , A. Volein