Baby’s Gaze May Signal Autism, a Study Finds

By Pam Belluck

When and how long a baby looks at other people’s eyes offers the earliest behavioral sign to date of whether a child is likely to develop autism, scientists are reporting.

In a study published Wednesday, researchers using eye-tracking technology found that children who were found to have autism at age 3 looked less at people’s eyes when they were babies than children who did not develop autism. But contrary to what the researchers expected, the difference was not apparent at birth. It emerged in the next few months and autism experts said that might suggest a window during which the progression toward autism can be halted or slowed.

The study, published online in the journal Nature, found that infants who later developed autism began spending less time looking at people’s eyes between 2 and 6 months of age and paid less attention to eyes as they grew older. By contrast, babies who did not develop autism looked increasingly at people’s eyes until about 9 months old, and then kept their attention to eyes fairly constant into toddlerhood.

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She said a possible explanation was that early in life, activities like looking at faces are essentially reflexes “controlled by lower cortical regions of the brain that are likely intact” in children with autism. But “as the brain develops, babies begin to use these behaviors in a more intentional way. They can look at what they want to look at. We think that these higher cortical regions are the ones that are not working the same” as in typical children.

Dr. John N. Constantino, a child psychiatrist and pediatrician at Washington University in St. Louis, said the study showed that “babies who develop autism are for the most part doing an awful lot of things right for the first few months.” Perhaps the genes that drive autism begin to derail typical development after that, so that “what you are looking at moment by moment, day by day, second by second, is completely different from what other children are looking at, and the cumulative experience is what sends you off into the trajectory of autism.”

The researchers found that children who developed autism paid somewhat more attention to mouths and sustained attention to bodies past the age when typical children became less interested. Even more noticeable was that children who developed autism looked more at objects after the first year, while typical children’s interest in objects declined.

“We’re measuring what babies see, but more importantly we’re measuring what they don’t see,” Dr. Jones said.

Dr. Dawson said that looking at people teaches babies about “facial expressions and language and gesture. If the baby who’s developing autism is paying attention to objects, they’re really losing out on those opportunities.”