Objectives: As part of the Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) ACE Network investigating early brain and behavior development at 6, 12, and 24 months in infant siblings of children with (high risk) and without (low risk) autism, our study aims to investigate the frequency and variety of object exploration behaviors and the level of or sophistication of play during a semi-structured play session at the 12 month visit.
Methods: As part of the IBIS Network 12-month behavioral battery, each infant is assessed with the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales (CSBS; Wetherby and Prizant, 2002). Independent, reliably trained coders evaluated recordings of the final portion of the CSBS behavioral scales using the IBIS-PlayGrid. The session involves a variety of play kitchen utensils (i.e. spoons, bowls, bottles, a frying pan, etc.) and a doll.The IBIS-PlayGrid captures the frequency with which actions occur, forms an inventory of the objects explored, and classifies actions into four levels of play: simple exploratory (i.e. mouthing, banging, shaking), relational (i.e. stacking), functional-relational (i.e. stirring), and pretend (i.e. pretending to feed Big Bird). Our current sample includes 14 13-month-olds: n = 7 high-risk infants [mean age = 56.6 weeks (sd=2.2)];n = 7 low-risk infants [mean age = 60.2 weeks (sd=2.5)]. Coding is ongoing, and our sample size will have at least 75 high-risk and 40 low-risk infants for presentation at IMFAR in May of 2010.
Results: Student t-tests were conducted to evaluate group differences. Preliminary analyses indicate that high-risk infants perform significantly fewer functional-relational actions than low-risk peers (p=0.003). Additionally, statistical trends are present, indicating that high-risk infants play with fewer objects in a functional-relational manner (p=0.06) and a larger proportion of their actions are simple exploratory behaviors (p=0.06) as compared to low-risk peers.
Conclusions: Data collection is ongoing and the majority of children in our high-risk group will develop on a typical trajectory (approximately 1 out of 20 might develop autism). However, the large group differences in play behavior by 12 months demonstrates the potential value of the play behavior coding scheme as a tool for identifying and monitoring behavioral markers in the domain of play and object exploration. These results also provide evidence that differences in play behavior in the first year of life may be a distinguishing characteristic between children at high versus low risk for developing autism.