Social communication and social cognition in children with congenital visual impairment (VI)

Background: Previous research has shown that the pattern of socio-communicative and socio-cognitive development in children born with severely impaired vision often bears a striking resemblance to that of sighted children with autism. Objectives: It is now critical to provide a more detailed picture of such development and in particular to focus on children with IQ’s in the normal range. Methods: 15 children with congenital VI and no other impairments were matched on verbal IQ, age and gender to a group of 26 typically developing children with normal vision. The behavioural ratings of every-day social communication were obtained through parental reports using the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ) and Children's Communication Checklist -2 (CCC2). An adaptation of Rieffe & Terwogt (2000) emotion understanding task was used to examine the children's spontaneous use of mental state language when explaining other people's emotional states.

Results: In comparison to the sighted controls, the children with visual impairment showed significantly poorer socio-communicative outcomes on the SCQ and the pragmatic and social aspects of the CCC-2. A considerable proportion of children with visual impairment exhibited socio-communicative profiles that were consistent with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (33% on the SCQ and 64% on the CCC-2). However, the children with visual impairment were comparable to their sighted controls in their ability to predict emotional states of story characters and used mental-state language to describe emotions as frequently. Conclusions: The findings are considered in the context of identifying a broader autism phenotype in children born with severely impaired vision and the potential for language-based interventions.