They look less frequently at the face and eyes of people than other infants and are less likely to coordinate their attention with another person to adopt a common point of view or reference, or “joint attention.” Infants with neurotypical development follow the gaze direction or gesture of other people or lead the gaze of other people to establish joint attention and share information through a common perceptual perspective.ĭeveloping the ability to coordinate attention socially is important in and of itself. As it turns out, one key to understanding the development of our social brains may come from observations of social attention in infancy.Īs early as six to 12 months of age, some infants who go on to receive an autism diagnosis already display differences in the development of social attention. Serendipitously, this motivation to understand the very early development of our social brain can inform the broader understanding of social-cognitive neuroscience and human nature. These questions are essential in autism science because understanding the early course of social-cognitive neurodevelopment may afford the best opportunity to mitigate the profoundly negative effects that social-cognitive differences can have on some autistic people. These observations are informative, but do not address fundamental questions about how social-cognitive brain systems develop or why their development might be different for autistic people. These differences can lead to a range of outcomes, from problems in the capacity to mentalize to alterations in the spontaneous use of mentalizing, or the motivation and effort involved in mentalizing during social interactions. Accordingly, differences in the development and/or transmissions of information across this distributed social-cognitive brain network may contribute to differences in mentalizing among autistic people. Social-cognitive neuroscience tells us that brain systems of the medial frontal cortex, temporal cortex and parietal cortex, as well as reward centers of the brain, enable mentalizing. For example, many experience some level of difficulty with social-cognitive mentalizing, also known as “theory of mind”-the mental representation of other people’s thoughts, perspectives, beliefs, intentions or emotions, which enables us to understand or predict their behaviors.
Regardless of their outcomes, though, people on the autism spectrum travel a different path of social-cognitive neurodevelopment that appears to begin in infancy. It is associated with a wide range of life outcomes, from “disorder” or the profound challenges that encumber about 30 percent of affected individuals with minimal language and intellectual disability, to “differences” among people who have well-above-average abilities and accomplishments. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex and heterogeneous part of the human condition, or neurodiversity. Some of these involve brain systems involved in thinking about other people’s thoughts or intentions, empathizing, social motivation and the impact of social attention on an individual’s thinking and emotions.Īt the same time, research with and for autistic people has also enriched social-cognitive neuroscience and the understanding of how our social minds develop.
For those unfamiliar with the term, social-cognitive neuroscience is the study of the brain systems that are involved in the causes and effects of social behaviors and social interaction. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), and it is evident in this year’s meeting that the growth of social-cognitive neuroscience over the past two decades has significantly enriched autism science.
Since the modern era of research on autism began in the 1980s, questions about social cognition and social brain development have been of central interest to researchers.