PLEASE NOTE: Our seminar room has a limited capacity. Please arrive early to ensure you get a seat. The talk will begin promptly at 5. NOTE: This talk will take place on MONDAY next week IN ADDITION to our regular seminar on Wednesday. Teodora Gliga & The BASIS team Birkbeck, University of London 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 Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events _______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-subscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-unsubscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu