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Atypical Social Referencing in Infant Siblings of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

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Abstract

Social referencing was investigated in 18-month-old siblings of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD; “high-risk infants”). Infants were exposed to novel toys, which were emotionally tagged via adults’ facial and vocal signals. Infants’ information seeking (initiation of joint attention with an adult) and their approach/withdrawal behavior toward the toys before versus after the adults’ emotional signals was measured. Compared to both typically developing infants and high-risk infants without ASD, infants later diagnosed with ASD engaged in slower information seeking, suggesting that this aspect of referencing may be an early indicator of ASD. High-risk infants, both those who were and those who were not later diagnosed with ASD, exhibited impairments in regulating their behavior based on the adults’ emotional signals, suggesting that this aspect of social referencing may reflect an endophenotype for ASD.

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Notes

  1. Note that the use of the term ‘behavior regulation’ in the context of social referencing is somewhat different from another common use of the term in the ASD literature, where it may refer to behaviors on the part of the child in order to fulfill a goal.

  2. Data from the LR infant who was subsequently diagnosed with ASD were included in the ASD group in keeping with the study’s goal of investigating the early emergence of social referencing impairments in ASD.

  3. The ASD group was not included in this analysis because there were too few values in each cell to meet the assumptions of a Chi Square test. In addition, at the time of testing, it was unknown which HR infants would later meet ASD diagnostic criteria. Nevertheless, the emotion orders of the ASD infants were distributed, with two infants assigned to order 1, zero to order 2, two to order 3, three to order 4, and one each to orders 5 and 6.

  4. Infants’ looking behavior is referred to as information seeking throughout this paper because our paradigm was designed to study social referencing, of which information seeking is a crucial part. Nevertheless, the motivation driving infants’ looking behavior when confronted by an ambiguous stimulus is uncertain. When infants’ referential looking is followed by appropriate behavior regulation toward the stimulus in accordance with the emotional signals, it is reasonable to infer that their looking was motivated by information seeking. However, in cases where infants looked referentially to adults but did not appropriately regulate their behavior, it is possible that they were not in fact seeking information.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by NIH (R01 HD052804-01A2), the MIND Institute, and Autism Speaks (KRD and LJC). We thank the families that participated; Annette Cluver, Rebecca Cunningham, Kelly Deegan, Elizabeth Dohrmann, Sara Geal-Touhy, Fiona Ma, Michelle Peltz, Kellie Swayne, Margaret Swingler, Lisa Tully, and Faye Van der Fluit for their contributions to the project; and members of the Developmental Cognitive and Social Neuroscience Lab for assistance with data collection and coding.

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Author notes

  1. Lauren Cornew

    Present address: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Lauren Cornew & Karen R. Dobkins

  2. Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Natacha Akshoomoff

  3. School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Joseph P. McCleery

  4. Department of Psychology and Program in Human Development, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, Mail Code: 0109, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0109, USA

    Leslie J. Carver

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  1. Lauren Cornew
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  2. Karen R. Dobkins
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  4. Joseph P. McCleery
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  5. Leslie J. Carver
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Correspondence to Leslie J. Carver.

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Cornew, L., Dobkins, K.R., Akshoomoff, N. et al. Atypical Social Referencing in Infant Siblings of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. J Autism Dev Disord 42, 2611–2621 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-012-1518-8

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