Abstract
A fundamental question in functional brain development is how the brain acquires specialised processing optimised for its individual environment. The current study is the first to demonstrate that distinct experience of eye gaze communication, due to the visual impairment of a parent, affects the specificity of brain responses to dynamic gaze shifts in infants. Event-related potentials (ERPs) from 6 to 10 months old sighted infants with blind parents (SIBP group) and control infants with sighted parents (CTRL group) were recorded while they observed a face with gaze shifting Toward or Away from them. Unlike the CTRL group, ERPs of the SIBP group did not differentiate between the two directions of gaze shift. Thus, selective brain responses to perceived gaze shifts in infants may depend on their eye gaze communication experience with the primary caregiver. This finding highlights the critical role of early communicative experience in the emerging functional specialisation of the human brain.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting around 1% of the population
We previously discovered that infant siblings of children with ASD had stronger pupillary light reflexes compared to low-risk infants, a result which contrasts sharply with the weak pupillary light reflex typically seen in both children and adults with ASD
We will report the results based on the combined EASE and BASIS samples, using three groups: 1) high risk infants later diagnosed with ASD (HR-ASD); 2) high risk infants who did not receive an ASD diagnosis at follow up (HR-no-ASD); 3) a control group of TD infants
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting around 1% of the population. We recently discovered that unlike children and adults with an ASD diagnosis7,8, 10-month-old infants at high risk for ASD (due to having an older sibling with the disorder) had stronger PLRs than low-risk-control infants with no family history of ASD10. This finding raised the possibility that the PLR might associate with ASD, it might describe neurodevelopmental processes that are on an atypical trajectory in infants that will develop this disorder. We analyzed the pupil data longitudinally in infancy to see if we could find support for the presence of different developmental trajectories of the reflex in ASD vs. controls
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