baby
English

Unipd Research: How infants with sluggish reorienting may predict future social skills

08.05.2024

Scientific research has long aimed to understand the neural circuits underlying human social skills, and how alterations of these circuits could be the basis of autism, a developmental disorder characterized by difficulties socio-communicative behaviors.

Early alteration of attention could be one of the main causes of dysfunction in communication and social skills. Attention is that neural mechanism that guides our actions and our perception. In particular, the ability to divert our attention, also called saccadic latencies, allows the infant to shift interest from the event that captured their attention, thus promoting more efficient exploration of the surrounding world in which they can discover and interact with. 

Could diverting attention too slowly from one event to another be the basis of less future interaction? Will this determine the future development of social skills? Can we already see this disorder in infants as young as 8-month-old? Could this be an early sign of their subsequent communicative and social development, such as being on the autistic spectrum?

Published in Cerebral Cortex by a research team coordinated by the University of Padua, the article “Infants’ reorienting efficiency depends on parental autistic traits and predicts future socio-communicative behaviors” appeared in a special issue dedicated to the biological bases of autism.

Prof Andrea Facoetti of the Department of General Psychology at the University of Padua explains, “What emerged from the research is that infants displaying attention reorienting constitutes a strong relationship between a slight dysfunction of the automatic mechanism controlled by the frontoparietal network of the right hemisphere. The work hypothesized that the presence of subclinical autistic traits in parents may lead to atypical infants’ attentional reorienting, which in turn may impact their future socio-communication behavior in toddlerhood. The research, confirmed by the behavioral traits’ parents offers important consequences of this discovery based on specific attention-enabling programs that could be used to develop early prevention campaigns. Unfortunately, cases of autism are increasing, therefor if we can identify indicators in infants as young as 8 months old we could support those at risk of developing social interaction and communication disorders, which in the most serious forms could even lead to autism.”