A new study conducted by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and Emory University in Atlanta, and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has found how children visually engage with others in social situations is a heritable behavior that is altered in children with autism.
For their study, researchers reportedly conducted eye-tracking experiments in a group of 250 typically developing toddlers ages 18 to 24 months, including identical and non-identical twins, non-sibling children, and non-twin children diagnosed with autism. As the children watched videos, special software reportedly captured how often the children looked at different regions of the video, as well as the timing and direction of eye movements.
The research team reportedly found identical twins had synchronized visual patterns, compared to non-identical twins and non-sibling pairs. And researchers also reportedly found children with autism looked at eye and mouth regions — the most heritable visual traits — much less, compared to the other groups of children.
With these findings, researchers reportedly believe they can explore which genes are involved in social visual engagement, how they interact with a child’s environment to shape his/her social engagement, and how these genetic pathways are disrupted in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.
The study was recently published in the journal Nature.
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Source: National Institutes of Health