Sticky mittens
Social interactions, by definition, would seem to be fundamentally about people: eyes and facial expressions, speech and gestures, self-consciousness, projections and deception. So when I think of the science of social development, studies of face perception, eye contact, joint attention and moral dilemmas are the ones that come to mind.
But could the key to social development lie in motor development, and in an infant's early interactions with non-social objects?
That's the premise of a new study, published 9 September in Developmental Science. The researchers showed that reaching for and actively playing with toys can boost young infants' interest in faces.
The researchers divided 55 3-month-old babies into three groups, one of active play training, one of passive training and a control group that received no training. In both the training groups, babies played with a parent ten minutes a day for two weeks.
Because babies this young don't have fine motor skills, they wore 'sticky mittens' covered in Velcro and played with Velcro-covered blocks.
In the active training group, the parents showed their babies how to reach for toy blocks and then encouraged them to do it on their own. In the passive training group, parents picked up the blocks and touched them to the babies' palms.
After two weeks, all of the infants took a test in which they looked at pictures of objects and faces on a computer monitor while wearing an eye-tracking device. Only the infants from the active training group spent significantly more time looking at faces than objects, the study found.
What's more, after controlling for gender, birth weight and parents’ education level, the study found that the more that infants reached out for toys, the greater their preference for faces.
But why would reaching behavior affect face preference?
The researchers suggest that by participating in an action, babies begin to understand themselves as independent agents with specific goals. This could help them see other people's actions as intentional and might make them more interested in looking at their faces.
Alternatively, or perhaps in parallel, it could be that the brain has some kind of 'motor resonance' system that allows us to couple our own actions with those of other people. Research on mirror neurons lends some credence to that idea.
It's a neat experiment with several smart controls, but it may be flawed by the fact that the researchers couldn't measure the parents' behavior. For example, it could be that the parents in the active training group, after watching their children learn to reach out for objects, treated them differently after the ten-minute session.
Still, if the results hold up, they might explain why the social deficits of children with autism are sometimes accompanied by motor and gait problems. Imagine the implications for autism therapies — you could potentially help children improve their eye contact and more complicated social interactions by working on their motor and play skills.
Comments
I found this hurtful. Shades of Bettleheim and blame for our inadequacies as parents. I found myself looking back, thinking, "Did I do this for Ben?", and not remembering specifically doing it, the old guilt crept back in. My son is autistic because I am an inadequate parent. What happened to genetics? At least I could get a reprieve from the guilt, Ben is adopted.
And his birth father's family was "iffy".
What I want to know is, how many of the 3 month old children were autistic? Even by Korean standards, maybe one. Try this therapy with older autistic children, say, 18 months, to determine if it is helpful to autistic children.
Let me give a hypothetical example. At three months, we probably know a child is blind. We know the pathways are atypical in the brain, because the sensory information received is atypical. If we begin to treat the child as if they are seeing, will they no longer be blind as adults? We understand about as much about the word-blindness of autism. We can help to create a more precocious child, if they have the architecture to build upon, but do autistic children have that architecture? When we constantly compare them to "normal" rather than doing the HARD WORK of figuring out exactly who THEY are, we will never see beyond normal.
Hi usethebrains,
I'm sorry you found the post hurtful; it certainly wasn't my intent to suggest that autism is caused by inadequate parenting. That idea has long been debunked.
As for the study, you astutely note that these were typically developing children from the general population. The researchers are showing that there may be a link between motor development and social development. What this means for autism, or autism interventions, is far from clear. But the data is intriguing.
Thanks so much for reading SFARI.org.
It's not your fault that I found it a little hurtful. It's just part of being a parent. You never quit blaming yourself for your children's problems. With the historical precedent of autism, nobody else quits blaming you, either, hah!
I so appreciate the ability to put my input in here, beings as this is a scientific journal and I am not a scientist by any means. Time,and the ability to look back and understand with my own wisdom, rather than relying solely on the knowledge of experts (as I HAD to at the start) has given me insight that I think is important to science. The insight of my son would be the only thing I could see that would be more worthwile to bridge the gaps that are unknown or unknowable to science at the present time.
Knowledge cannot divorce itself from reality. Observation changes things, and always has the preconceived ideas and prejudices of the observer.
Yes, there is little doubt in my mind that parents understand the ins and outs of the autism phenotype much better than most scientists -- or science writers -- do. Thanks for contributing to our discussions here.