According to a Yale School of Medicine study, infant girls at risk for autism deal better with social cues than infant boys. The research is the first one to examine prospectively sex-related social differences in infants at risk for autism.
The study report is published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. According to lead author Katarzyna Chawarska, associate professor in the Yale Child Study Center and in the Department of Pediatrics, infant girls pay more attention to social cues in faces. This difference in social and observational skills could help protect siblings of autistic girls from developing the disorder themselves.
According to Science Daily, Chawarska and her colleagues conducted a prospective study that measured spontaneous social attention. The study focused on a group of 61 infants with no risk of autism compared with 101 infants between the ages of 6 and 12 months who have older siblings suffering from autism. Chawarska declared that, compared with children without autism history in the family, high-risk siblings are about 15 to 20 times more likely develop the medical condition.
During the research, the infants were all watching a video of a woman smiling and cooing at them. While being shown the video the infants were involved in various other activities like preparing a sandwich or pointing to toys in different parts of the screen. The researchers analyzed where and for how long the infants focused their gazes.
Chawarska, who is also director of the Early Social Cognition Laboratory at Yale, explained that the research team has found that the girls in the high-risk group have shown more attention to people's faces than all other infants. According to her, infancy is a highly formative developmental period.
This increased access to social experiences during infancy predicted less social impairment at 2 years of age. Even if this may not prevent autism spectrum disorders in high-risk females, it could at least reduce the severity of symptoms.
