AP31104

Science Summary

It has been discovered that a fraction of babies are eligible to become autistic due to an older sibling having autism. To potentially detect autism in the earlier stages of life, researchers are studying various things in baby development. They must understand the relationship of joint attention before the first year the symptoms are shown and after the first year of symptoms. Joint attention, or the act of making eye contact with another person to share an experience (University of Miami), has been previously studied showing that low levels of exibiting joint attention are linked to later autism symptoms in high-risk siblings. The ability to coordinate attention with another person without a smile, without an emotional component, seems to be particularly important for high-risk siblings in the development of ASD symptoms (Devon Gangi, Ph.D). Joint attention without a positive effective component (a smile) in the first year is particularly important to this relationship, high-risk siblings seem to have particular difficulty in sharing their preexisting positive affect with another person, which is what happens during an anticipatory smile (Daniel Messinger). The researchers saw that some are at risk and some are not, it all depends on a lot of variables. I believe this should be further studied because it could have a great affect on treating early autism children, and predicting if a child will have it so the family can be prepared and also learn prior to having the child, so that the child will have the best life possible.

References:

University of Miami

Devon Gangi, Ph.D. student in the UM College of Arts and Sciences and first author of the study

Daniel Messinger, professor of psychology in the UM College of Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the study

University of Miami. "Early warning sign for babies at risk of autism: Early joint attention predicts later autism symptoms." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 24 July 2014. .

Devon N. Gangi, Lisa V. Ibañez, Daniel S. Messinger. **Joint Attention Initiation With and Without Positive Affect: Risk Group Differences and Associations with ASD Symptoms**. //Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders//, 2013; 44 (6): 1414 DOI: 10.1007/s10803-013-2002-9

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