Special education professionals and teachers of students with autism face many behavioral and instructional challenges. In addition to teaching content to a demanding population, teachers are often faced with particular circumscribed and special interests that often take up time and divert attention from the students. It is an educators job to…

Variability in attention towards direct gaze and child-directed speech may contribute to heterogeneity of clinical presentation in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). To evaluate this hypothesis, we clustered sixty-five 20-month-old toddlers with ASD based on their visual responses to dyadic cues for engagement, identifying three…

The angry superiority effect refers to more efficient way individuals detect angry relative to happy faces in a crowd. Given their socio-emotional deficits, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may be impervious to this effect. Thirty children with ASD and 30 matched-typically developing children were presented with a visual search task,…

We examined social attention and attention shifting during (a) a play interaction between 12-month olds and an examiner and (b) after the examiner pretended to hurt herself. We coded the target and duration of infants' visual fixations and frequency of attention shifts. Siblings of children with autism and controls with no family history of autism…

This study used eyetracking to investigate the ability of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to recognize social (faces) and nonsocial (simple objects and complex block patterns) stimuli using the visual paired comparison (VPC) paradigm. Typically developing (TD) children showed evidence for recognition of faces and simple…

Recent research has demonstrated that infants' attention towards novel objects is affected by an adult's emotional expression and eye gaze toward the object. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated how infants at 3, 6, and 9 months of age process fearful compared to neutral faces looking toward objects or averting gaze away…

To test the hypothesis that biological motion perception is developmentally integrated with important social cognitive abilities, 12-month-olds (N = 36) were shown a display of a human point-light figure turning to observe a target. Infants spontaneously and reliably followed the figure's "gaze" despite the absence of familiar and socially…

Mounting clinical evidence suggests that abnormalities of social engagement in children with autism are present even during infancy. However, direct experimental documentation of these abnormalities is still limited. In this case report of a 15-month-old infant with autism, we measured visual fixation patterns to both naturalistic and ambiguous…

Infants represent the acts of others and their own acts in commensurate terms. They can recognize cross-modal equivalences between acts they see others perform and their own felt bodily movements. This recognition of self-other equivalences in action gives rise to interpreting others as having similar psychological states such as perceptions and…