Children with autism generally avoid social contact, but scientists were never sure why until now. A recent UW-Madison brain study suggests that autistic individuals feel uncomfortable and threatened by looking another person in the eye.
\Imagine walking through the world and interpreting every face that looks at you as a threat, even the face of your own mother,"" Richard Davidson, UW-Madison professor of psychiatry and psychology, told University Communications.
Such is the world of autistic individuals.
Autism is a neurological disorder characterized by the lack of, or slow development of, physical and social skills. Afflicted individuals may exhibit abnormal ways of relating to people, objects and events, according to Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children in Maryland. Autism strikes between two and six of every 1,000 babies, and is four times more common in males than in females.
Kim Dalton was the lead author of the study and is an assistant researcher at UW-Madison's Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior. For the study, published in the March 6 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience. Dalton's team placed children with autism in an MRI scanner where the children were shown photographs of neutral and expressive faces.
With a precise eye-tracking device, Dalton studied whether the participants were looking at the faces and what part of the faces they viewed. She found that individuals with autism did not look at the eyes as much as members of the control group did.
In a second study, Dalton's team showed the children photographs of familiar and unfamiliar faces and tracked the subjects' responses with technology that coordinated eye movements with the brain activity. The autistic children showed an activation of the amygdala, a center of the brain associated with negative feelings.
The study topples the existing idea that children with autism have a malfunction in the fusiform part of the cortex, the part of the brain that processes faces; and instead focuses scientists' attention on the activation of the amygdala.
Dalton has worked with many autistic individuals who tell her that looking people in the eye is unpleasant.
""[Non-autistic] people shouldn't take it as they're being ignored or that [the autistic individual is] not paying attention to them. It's just a different way of communicating,"" Dalton said.
For Cathy Van Leuven, whose 16-year-old son David is autistic, the study results bring comforting news.
""The neatest thing about it as a parent is that I have a piece of neurological evidence that says look, this is a difference in the brain, this isn't an emotional problem, it isn't bad parenting,"" she said.
Van Leuven consults about autism to schools in southern Wisconsin. She trains teachers who deal with autism and will use the UW-Madison study in her work.
""This is a huge piece to help people understand how much stress these kids are under,"" she said. ""Sometimes you have to accommodate, live with the autism and then teach, because [the children are] under so much stress dealing with all the variations in how they are perceiving things that they can't learn.""
