Common symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) include avoidance or poor of eye contact and anxiousness or inappropriateness in social interactions. Both of which cause ASD’s current diagnosis to be particularlystressful for individuals suffering with ASD, especially children. Additionally, intervention is unfortunately usually made around the ages of 2-3 years old to avoid false-positive autism diagnosis. Due to this rather late intervention, Dr. Guy and colleagues researched event-related potentials in children with varying risks of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as they were exposed to familiar and novel, face and toy stimuli.Dr. Guy and colleagues chose to research this neural activation because individuals with ASD have been found to have atypical processing of faces and we have seen that this ability emerges early in development. Researchers found that infants with fragile X syndrome (FXS) and infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASIBs), both considered to be groups at high risk for developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD), respond very differently to familiar and novel stimuli in terms of their neural activity compared to both controls and to each other.
Like Dr. Guy, in Science Daily’s article “New technique developed to detect autism in children” researchers from the University of Waterloo’s main motivation for their research is also early intervention and diagnosis in children with ASD. Researchers in this study have similarly described how children with ASD view a person's face differently than a neuro-typical child. However, researchers in this study evaluated how individuals with ASD move their eyes and scan faces, instead of their neural activation towards faces like in Dr. Guy’s study. In this study, researchers were able to establish a diagnosis approach based on the results that consider how a child with ASD looks at an area to a person’s face and transitions to another area.
These two studies complement each other because we can identify how the whole process of face perception, starting with eye movement and face scanning and ending in the neural activation towards faces, in high-risk infants is different than that of children with typical development. Additionally, as both of these articles study individuals with ASD or individuals with high risk of ASD, they study groups that may differ too much in brain structure or function. This may greatly affect as to how these individuals behave and differences in neural activation or brain function may be too different between them and this can potentially lead to changing results. Reflecting and analyzing both of these articles can allow us to conclude that better diagnostic methods could favor neuroscientists diagnosing children with ASD at earlier ages by not depending only on behavior that could potentially change with development, but rather using different techniques to create more reliable diagnosis.
New technique developed to detect autism in children. (2019, July 9). Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190709091139.htm
Guy, M. W., Richards, J. E., Tonnsen, B. L., & Roberts, J. E. (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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2017.03.002
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