International Meeting for Autism Research (London, May 15-17, 2008): SELF-PERCEPTION AND SOCIAL ORIENTING IN YOUNG CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Champagne Terrace/Bordeaux (Novotel London West)

L. E. Bahrick , Psychology, Florida International University, Miami, FL

I. Castellanos , Psychology, Florida International University, Miami, FL

M. Shuman , Psychology, Florida International University, Miami, FL

M. Vaillant-Molina , Psychology, Florida International University, Miami, FL

L. C. Newell , Psychology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA

B. M. Sorondo , Psychology, Florida International University, Miami, FL

Background: Children with autism show self-awareness and social orienting deficits (e.g., Dawson, Meltzoff, Osterling, Rinaldi, & Brown, 1998; Gergely, 2001). Self-perception and social orienting develop in infancy, partly from detecting contingent relations between visual and proprioceptive feedback from self-produced body motion (Bahrick, 1995). By five months, infants demonstrate social orienting and prefer to watch the noncontingent video display of a peer’s leg motions over the perfectly contingent display of their own leg motions (Bahrick & Watson, 1985).

Objectives: We assessed self-perception and social orienting in young children with autism (ASD) and typically developing (TD) children.

Methods: Nine ASD (M = 3.60 yrs) and nine TD children (M = 2.55 yrs), matched for functional age on the ABAS (TD: M = 2.30 yrs; SD = .54; ASD: M = 2.23, SD = .84), participated in a task identical to Bahrick & Watson’s (1985) visual paired-comparison procedure. A perfectly contingent, live video of the child’s own leg motions was shown alongside a pre-recorded noncontingent video of a peer’s leg motions, both wearing white socks.

Results: TD, but not ASD, children discriminated between the contingent display of their own leg motions and the noncontingent display of a peer’s leg motions. TD children showed social orienting by looking preferentially to the noncontingent peer display t(8) = 2.82, p < .05; ASD children showed no preference (p > .05), and their looking to the peer was significantly lower than that of TD children t(16) = 2.35, p < .05.

Conclusions: In contrast with TD infants and children, ASD children showed no evidence of detecting the intermodal proprioceptive-visual contingency generated by self motion, and no discrimination of contingent self motion from noncontingent peer motion. Future research will assess whether these findings are attributable to impaired social orienting, impaired detection of intermodal proprioceptive-visual contingency, or both.

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