Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a fairly common neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts the nervous system and causes obsessive interest, sensory aversion, difficulty with communication and sensory interactions. ASD affects around 1 in every 100 children worldwide; those affected often have difficulties decoding facial expression. Event-related potentials are used to measure neural activity in a given brain region.
In the article Cortical Source Analysis of the Face Sensitive N290 ERP Component in Infants at High Risk for Autism, Dr. Guy created head models on infants who had a high risk of autism to examine how their ERP levels differed from infants at low risk for autism, specifically examining their ERP levels when shown faces. It is known that young infants who have an older sibling with autism have a greater risk of developing autism, and people with autism usually are socially impaired due to their inability to read others’ facial expressions. She found that infants with a high risk of autism showed a delay in ERPs compared to those with low risk. She also studied infants with fragile X syndrome and noticed they have faster ERPs than infants without Fragile X.
Dr. Renata Di Lorenzo, at the Helmholtz Institute at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, studied the visual processing of infants with a higher familial likelihood of developing ASD. The team also studied infant processing of different facial expressions in those at a high risk of autism by using neutral and fearful facial expressions that contained high and low spatial frequency. They measured visual ERPs and found that there was no substantial difference between high risk and low risk infants in the spatial frequency processing. However, consistent with their hypothesis they found that those in the high-risk group did not differentiate the fearful face from the neutral face at any level of spatial frequency, whereas the low-risk group discriminated between the facial expressions when the high spatial frequencies were displayed.
Similarly, Dr. Guy’s study participants who had older siblings with autism spectrum disorder were classified as at high risk for developing ASD due to information from a previous study. It was found that a child is 14 times likelier to have autism if their older sibling does.1 Since participants were 10 months old in Dr. Di Lorenzo’s study and 12 months old in Dr. Guy’s study, they were all unable to be formally diagnosed with ASD. If this research can provide some insight regarding early signs of ASD intervention can take place earlier in development and possibly alleviate symptoms.
In conclusion, these studies demonstrate how children who are at high risk have lower ERPs when processing faces. Poor facial processing causes a delay in emotional recognition and therefore low social awareness. These results could suggest that symptoms of autism are present in young children. Therefore, more research should be done in the future to determine if early intervention would be beneficial for these children, so their symptoms of autism are not as severe later in life.
Reference:
1Kaiser Permanente. "Autism risk in younger children increases if they have older sibling with disorder." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 August 2016. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160805230101.htm>.
Di Lorenzo, R., Munsters, N.M., Ward, E.K. et al. Is It Fear? Similar Brain Responses to Fearful and Neutral Faces in Infants with a Heightened Likelihood for Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 51, 961–972 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04560-x
Guy, M.W.; Richards, J.E.; Roberts, J.E. Cortical Source Analysis of the Face Sensitive N290 ERP Component in Infants at High Risk for Autism. Brain Sci. 2022, 12, 1129. https://doi.org/10.3390/ brainsci12091129
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