Gaze behaviour to lateral face stimuli in infants who do and do not receive an ASD diagnosis

Georgina Donati,Rachael Davis,Gillian S Forrester

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-69898-9

Georgina Donati, Rachael Davis + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-69898-9

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Abstract

Cerebral lateralisation of function is a common characteristic across vertebrate species and is positively associated with fitness of the organism, in humans we hypothesise that it is associated with cognitive fitness. This investigation evaluated the early development of lateralised gaze behaviour for face stimuli in infants at high and low risk for autism from the British Autism Sibling Infant Study (BASIS). The BASIS cohort includes a low risk group and three high-risk groups who at age 3 were developing (i) typically, (ii) atypically or (iii) had received a diagnosis for ASD. Using eye-tracking data derived from a face pop-out task at 6 and 14 months of age, all non-ASD groups showed a bias for stimuli on the left at both timepoints. At 6 months the ASD group demonstrated a preference for stimuli on the right and were slower than their neurotypical counterparts to look at faces on the left. However, by 14 months these differences disappear. Longitudinal associations between lateral looking behaviour at 6 months and language and motor ability at 14 months were also found. Results suggest that infants who go on to be diagnosed with autism exhibit early differences in gaze behaviour that may be associated with subsequent cognitive outcomes.

Highlights

In modern humans, lateralised sensory and motor functions are core components of mental p rocessing[5] and support the emergence of higher cognitive functions
In laboratory studies where participants are presented with the same face stimuli to both visual fields, they report those in the left visual field (LVF) to be more salient than those presented to the right visual field[15]
It has been argued that typical cognitive development results from the clear separation of hemispheric dominances associated with strong behavioural biases[25] and that weak or absent cerebral dominances predict weaker motor biases which in turn are associated with poorer subsequent cognitive a bilities[9,26,27,28]

Summary

Introduction

In modern humans, lateralised sensory and motor functions are core components of mental p rocessing[5] and support the emergence of higher cognitive functions. Humans demonstrate a robust left visual field (LVF) bias for perceiving human faces[10,11,12], and for detecting emotional e xpressions[13,14] This means they will look more to the right side of the face. The dominant hypothesis for the LVF advantage is due to a right hemisphere (RH) specialisation for face processing abilities in the majority of individuals This pattern of visual biases is not unique to humans. Ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny in the literal sense[23], during human cognitive development, higher processes are supported by and scaffold atop of early perceptual and motor capabilities[24], which are, by evolutionary design, cerebrally lateralised. Motor lateralisation has been associated with executive function (see[22] for a review)

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