Autism Research最新文献

Minimally verbal children constitute a portion of the autism spectrum. The paucity of proper measurement tools that sensitively and accurately assess behaviors has been one limiting factor in the improved knowledge of these children. Short of creating and validating a new measurement tool for this subpopulation, this study took an alternative and more immediate approach: conduct a secondary data analysis and examine an existing social communication measure, the Early Social Communication Scales (ESCS), with item response theory. The final sample consisted of 453 minimally verbal children culled from four different completed studies. The IRT models analyzed the frequency of social communication gestures from the ESCS and returned an objective difficulty hierarchy regarding initiations of joint attention and behavior regulation gestures. The best-fitting and final model was a zero-inflated negative binomial model (ZINBM), which determined that joint attention gestures were, on average, more difficult than behavior regulation gestures. Joint attentional shows and gives were essentially absent in the children's repertoire, and behavior regulation reaches were the easiest gestures for this sample. The ZINBM separately modeled children with some gestures and children who did not present with any gestures and determined that behavior regulation reaches and gives were likely the first gestures a child will eventually exhibit among children with no gestures. Methodological contributions and potential future applications of IRT are discussed.

Domain-general prediction differences have been posited as underlying many aspects of the cognitive-behavioral profile in autism. An interesting potential implication of such differences is hyperplasticity of learning—the idea that autistic individuals may privilege more recent input over the accumulation of prior learning. Because real world language input is highly variable, hyperplasticity could have serious ramifications for language learning. To investigate potential hyperplasticity during a language processing task, we administered an experimental anticipatory eye movement (AEM) task to 2- to 3-year-old autistic children and neurotypical (NT) peers. Autistic children's change in anticipation from before to after a switch in contingencies did not significantly differ from NT counterparts, failing to support claims of hyperplasticity in the linguistic domain. Analysis of individual differences among autistic children revealed that cognitive ability was associated with prediction of the initial, stable contingencies, but neither age nor receptive language related to task performance. Results are discussed in terms of clinical implications and the broader context of research investigating prediction differences in autism.

Research in the field of figurative language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has demonstrated that autistic individuals experience systematic difficulties in the comprehension of different types of metaphors. However, there is scarce evidence regarding metaphor production skills in ASD. Importantly, the exact source of metaphor processing difficulties in ASD remains largely controversial. The debate has mainly focused on the mediating role of structural language skills (i.e., lexical knowledge) and cognitive abilities (i.e., Theory of Mind and executive functions) in ASD individuals' ability to comprehend and generate metaphors. The present study examines metaphor comprehension and production in 18 Greek-speaking verbally able children with ASD and 31 typically-developing (TD) controls. Participants completed two tasks, namely, a low-verbal multiple-choice sentence-picture matching task that tested their ability to comprehend conventional predicate metaphors, and a sentence continuation task that assessed their ability to generate metaphors. The study also included measures of fluid intelligence, expressive vocabulary, and working memory within the sample. The results show that the ASD group had significantly lower performance than the TD group in both metaphor comprehension and production. The findings also reveal that expressive vocabulary skills were a key factor in the metaphor comprehension and production performance of the children with ASD. Working memory capacity was also found to correlate significantly with metaphor comprehension performance in the ASD group. Conversely, no correlations were found in the TD group with neither of the above factors. Of note, children with ASD generated significantly more inappropriate responses and no-responses to the metaphor production task compared with the control group. The overall results reveal that children with ASD had difficulty with both comprehending and using metaphorical language. The findings also indicate that TD children may employ diverse cognitive strategies or rely on different underlying skills when processing metaphors compared with children with ASD.

Breastfeeding is associated with medical and developmental benefits. This study aimed to assess associations between nutritional patterns in the first year of life and the likelihood of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). 270 children diagnosed with ASD (cases) and 500 neurotypical children (controls) matched to cases by sex, ethnicity, and birth date (± 3 months) were included in this retrospective case–control study. Both groups were ascertained from children born between 2014 and 2017 whose development/nutrition were monitored at mother–child health clinics in southern Israel. Conditional logistic regression was used to determine the independent association of nutritional patterns with ASD while adjusting for socio-demographic and clinical characteristics. Both exclusive and partial breastfeeding modes were associated with decreased odds of ASD diagnosis (aOR = 0.221, 95%CI = 0.136–0.360; aOR = 0.494, 95%CI = 0.328–0.743, respectively). A breastfeeding duration of >12 months was associated with lower ASD odds (aOR = 0.418, 95%CI = 0.204–0.855), while the introduction of solids after 6 months of age was associated with higher ASD odds than the introduction of solids at 6 months (aOR = 2.455, 95%CI = 1.116–4.201). These findings suggest that a longer period of exclusive breastfeeding is associated with a subsequent reduced likelihood of ASD diagnosis, thus reiterating the importance of proper post-natal nutrition for infant neurodevelopment.

How well autistic children can imitate movements and how their brain activity synchronizes with the person they are imitating have been understudied. The current study adopted functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning and employed a task involving real interactions involving meaningful and meaningless movement imitation to explore the fundamental nature of imitation as a dynamic and interactive process. Experiment 1 explored meaningful and meaningless gesture imitation. The results revealed that autistic children exhibited lower imitation accuracy and behavioral synchrony than non-autistic children when imitating both meaningful and meaningless gestures. Specifically, compared to non-autistic children, autistic children displayed significantly higher interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) in the right inferior parietal lobule (r-IPL) (channel 12) when imitating meaningful gestures but lower INS when imitating meaningless gestures. Experiment 2 further investigated the imitation of four types of meaningless movements (orofacial movements, transitive movements, limb movements, and gestures). The results revealed that across all four movement types, autistic children exhibited significantly lower imitation accuracy, behavioral synchrony, and INS in the r-IPL (channel 12) than non-autistic children. This study is the first to identify INS as a biomarker of movement imitation difficulties in autistic individuals. Furthermore, an intra- and interindividual imitation mechanism model was proposed to explain the underlying causes of movement imitation difficulties in autistic individuals.

Anxiety and depression are prevalent among autistic adolescents and may be difficult to accurately diagnose and treat given various factors (e.g., diagnostic overshadowing, heterogeneity). Therefore, efforts to examine transdiagnostic factors (i.e., distress tolerance, behavioral activation) may afford more parsimonious means for assessment and treatment. To our knowledge, there has been little research on distress tolerance, behavioral activation, and depressive and anxiety symptoms in autistic adolescents to guide diagnostic practices and treatment planning. In the current study, we examined the interrelationships between these transdiagnostic factors and depressive and anxiety symptoms using ratings from 100 verbally fluent autistic adolescents without intellectual disability (M_age = 13.70, SD_age = 2.23, Range: 11:00–17:11 years) and 100 of their caregivers. Many adolescents reported male sex assigned at birth (61%), cisgender (87%), not Hispanic/Latinx (90%), and White (80%) identities. A series of correlational analyses were employed to examine associations between these constructs from youth and caregiver perspectives, and multiple linear regression analyses were conducted to explore the mediating roles of distress tolerance and behavioral activation. Preliminary results show that low distress tolerance and behavioral activation were associated with more severe internalizing symptoms per self- and caregiver-report. Some differences by rater emerged, which highlight the importance of multi-informant ratings in autism. Results from mediation analyses may show that behavioral activation may be more salient to assessments and treatment planning for depression than distress tolerance, while distress tolerance may be important for both anxiety and depression; however, findings are preliminary given the cross-sectional nature of the data. Findings suggest that these transdiagnostic concepts may be important to individualizing treatment approaches, including the timing of certain approaches, for anxiety and/or depression in autistic adolescents.

Research has demonstrated that autistic individuals have higher rates of police contact, however, research has seldom explored the fundamental reasons for these interactions and how this might vary across international contexts. To remedy this, the Global Autism and Criminal Justice Consortium created and disseminated the Global Criminal Justice Survey. Descriptive statistics of survey respondents with and without police contact were compared to glean differential characteristics. Frequency and type of recent police interactions (within the last 5 years) among autistic individuals were also examined to better contextualize the reasons that autistic individuals encounter police. Study findings indicated that across a global sample (i.e., North America, Scandinavia, Europe, and Oceania) nearly half of all autistic individuals had an interaction with police and that those with a history of police contact were usually older, had higher educational qualifications, and were more likely to have a co-occurring mental health or developmental disorder. Among types of interactions, noncriminal encounters, such as welfare checks, traffic incidents, wandering, and behaviors associated with autism, were most common, followed by autistic individuals alleging a crime was committed against them. These findings offer important directions for future research and for targeted policy responses that can address the unique needs of autistic individuals within the justice system.

Autistic individuals encounter challenges in recognizing emotional expressions of others. Pupillary response has been proposed as an indicator of arousal dysregulation or cognitive load. The pupillary response of autistic individuals during socio-affective tasks remains unclear. This study investigated pupillary response in autistic adults when viewing emotional faces/eyes and recognizing emotions during the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) and watching interpersonal touch scenes in the social touch task. The study included 98 participants diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and 37 typically developing controls (TD). Pupil size was measured using the Tobii X2-30 Eye Tracker. The results showed that autistic adults had larger maximal pupil sizes, smaller minimal pupil sizes, and greater change rates of pupil size, particularly during the RMET Eyes task. Clinical correlations revealed that attention switching difficulty positively correlated with mean pupil size in TD participants, while social communication deficits positively correlated with mean pupil size in autistic participants. In conclusion, our findings suggest atypical pupillary responses in autistic adults during socio-affective tasks, indicating heightened cognitive demand. Further investigation is necessary to understand the underlying mechanisms and their association with autistic traits.

Face processing relies on predictive processes driven by low spatial frequencies (LSF) that convey coarse information prior to fine information conveyed by high spatial frequencies. However, autistic individuals might have atypical predictive processes, contributing to facial processing difficulties. This may be more normalized in autistic females, who often exhibit better socio-communicational abilities than males. We hypothesized that autistic females would display a more typical coarse-to-fine processing for socio-emotional stimuli compared to autistic males. To test this hypothesis, we asked adult participants (44 autistic, 51 non-autistic) to detect fearful faces among neutral faces, filtered in two orders: from coarse-to-fine (CtF) and from fine-to-coarse (FtC). Results show lower d’ values and longer reaction times for fearful detection in autism compared to non-autistic (NA) individuals, regardless of the filtering order. Both groups presented shorter P100 latency after CtF compared to FtC, and larger amplitude for N170 after FtC compared to CtF. However, autistic participants presented a reduced difference in source activity between CtF and FtC in the fusiform. There was also a more spatially spread activation pattern in autistic females compared to NA females. Finally, females had faster P100 and N170 latencies, as well as larger occipital activation for FtC sequences than males, irrespective of the group. Overall, the results do not suggest impaired predictive processes from LSF in autism despite behavioral differences in fear detection. However, they do indicate reduced brain modulation by spatial frequency in autism. In addition, the findings highlight sex differences that warrant consideration in understanding autistic females.

Different empathic responses are often reported in autism but remain controversial. To investigate which component of empathy is most affected by autism, we examined the affective, cognitive, and motivational components of empathy in 25 5- to 8-year-old autistic and 27 neurotypical children. Participants were presented with visual stimuli depicting people's limbs in painful or nonpainful situations while their eye movements, pupillary responses, and verbal ratings of pain intensity and empathic concern were recorded. The results indicate an emotional overarousal and reduced empathic concern to others' pain in autism. Compared with neurotypical children, autistic children displayed larger pupil dilation accompanied by attentional avoidance to others' pain. Moreover, even though autistic children rated others in painful situations as painful, they felt less sorry than neurotypical children. Interestingly, autistic children felt more sorry in nonpainful situations compared with neurotypical children. These findings demonstrated an emotional overarousal in response to others' pain in autistic children, and provide important implications for clinical practice aiming to promote socio-emotional understanding in autistic children.