Faces Creating Insight into Autism Spectrum Disorder

As Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), continues to become one of the quickest-growing developmental disabilities, at about 1 in 59 births, the need to determine its underlying genetic factors grows as well. ASD has no known cause yet, although pinning down the genetic differences at an early age would be extremely significant in finding an earlier diagnosis or even a cure.

In the article, “Neural correlates of face processing in etiologically-distinct 12-month-old infants at high-risk of autism spectrum disorder”, Maggie Guy tested the neural correlates of face and object processing with EEG recordings of infants who were at high-risk of ASD. Infants with a sibling diagnosed with ASD (who are 18-20 times more likely to be diagnosed), infants with fragile X syndrome, and those with no relation to ASD used as low-risk controls were all tested. Using electroencephalography, the event-related potential (ERP) of each of the 57 12-month-old infants were recorded in reaction to stimuli of their mothers’ faces, strangers’ faces, their favorite toy, and a toy they’d never seen before. Results of Guy’s research showed that neural correlates displayed differences between the groups that were at high-risk of ASD and exhibited facial recognition for low and high-risk infants.

Social behavior and interaction have also been studied to find if genetic differences are a driving force. In an article written for the New York Times, “Study of How We Look at Faces May Offer Insight into Autism”, the way in which toddlers look at faces was researched using eye-tracking. A study used 338 toddlers between 18 to 24 months old, 41 of which were pairs of identical twins, 42 pairs of fraternal twins, 84 children unrelated to each other and 88 children with autism were studied while watching videos. While looking at the eyes of people on the screen, the identical twins both matched 91% of the time, fraternal twins’ matched looking at the eyes 35% of the time, unrelated but matches with sex and age matched 16% and random didn’t match. Because the twins have the same genes and fraternal twins have 50% of the same genes, this suggests that the way in which toddlers look at faces has a genetic drive. However, the children with autism looked at the objects about twice as much and the faces about half the time of toddlers without autism.

Looking for early responses to face processing and eye-tracking among infants could be major in finding a genetic drive behind ASD. As this research shows, genes seem to have an effect in facial processing and the way infants look at faces, and finding which genes regulate these neural circuits for social and visual interaction with the world could help to diagnose earlier.

References 

Belluck, Pam. “Study of How We Look at Faces May Offer Insight Into Autism.” The New York

Times, The New York Times, 12 July 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/health/autism-faces-genes-brain-development.html.

Guy, Maggie (2018). Neural correlates of face processing in etiologically-distinct 12-month-old infants at high risk of autism spectrum disorder. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 29. 61-71.