1. Yale Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut 06519-1124, USA
2. Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA
3. Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8074, USA
4. Present addresses: Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA (D.J.L.); Neuroscience Graduate Program at Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37203, USA (P.G.).

Correspondence to: Ami Klin¹Warren Jones^1,3 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to A.K. (Email: ami.klin@yale.edu) or W.J. (Email: warren.jones@yale.edu).

Abstract

Typically developing human infants preferentially attend to biological motion within the first days of life¹. This ability is highly conserved across species^{2, 3} and is believed to be critical for filial attachment and for detection of predators⁴. The neural underpinnings of biological motion perception are overlapping with brain regions involved in perception of basic social signals such as facial expression and gaze direction⁵, and preferential attention to biological motion is seen as a precursor to the capacity for attributing intentions to others⁶. However, in a serendipitous observation⁷, we recently found that an infant with autism failed to recognize point-light displays of biological motion, but was instead highly sensitive to the presence of a non-social, physical contingency that occurred within the stimuli by chance. This observation raised the possibility that perception of biological motion may be altered in children with autism from a very early age, with cascading consequences for both social development and the lifelong impairments in social interaction that are a hallmark of autism spectrum disorders⁸. Here we show that two-year-olds with autism fail to orient towards point-light displays of biological motion, and their viewing behaviour when watching these point-light displays can be explained instead as a response to non-social, physical contingencies—physical contingencies that are disregarded by control children. This observation has far-reaching implications for understanding the altered neurodevelopmental trajectory of brain specialization in autism⁹.

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