Behavior and interaction imaging at 9 months of age predict autism/intellectual disability in high-risk infants with West syndrome.

Automated behavior analysis are promising tools to overcome current assessment limitations in psychiatry. At 9 months of age, we recorded 32 infants with West syndrome (WS) and 19 typically developing (TD) controls during a standardized mother-infant interaction. We computed infant hand movements (HM), speech turn taking of both partners (vocalization, pause, silences, overlap) and motherese. Then, we assessed whether multimodal social signals and interactional synchrony at 9 months could predict outcomes (autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID)) of infants with WS at 4 years. At follow-up, 10 infants developed ASD/ID (WS+). The best machine learning reached 76.47% accuracy classifying WS vs. TD and 81.25% accuracy classifying WS+ vs. WS-. The 10 best features to distinguish WS+ and WS- included a combination of infant vocalizations and HM features combined with synchrony vocalization features. These data indicate that behavioral and interaction imaging was able to predict ASD/ID in high-risk children with WS.

Developmental Trajectories of Hand Movements in Typical Infants and Those at Risk of Developmental Disorders: An Observational Study of Kinematics during the First Year of Life.

Highlights The kinematics of hand movements (spatial use, curvature, acceleration, and velocity) of infants with their mothers in an interactive setting are significantly associated with age in cohorts of typical and at-risk infantsdiffer significantly at 5-6 months of age, depending on the context: relating either with an object or a person.Environmental and developmental factors shape the developmental trajectories of hand movements in different cohorts: environment for infants with VIMs; stage of development for premature infants and those with West syndrome; and both factors for infants with orality disorders.The curvature of hand movements specifically reflects atypical development in infants with West syndrome when developmental age is considered. We aimed to discriminate between typical and atypical developmental trajectory patterns of at-risk infants in an interactive setting in this observational and longitudinal study, with the assumption that hand movements (HM) reflect preverbal communication and its disorders. We examined the developmental trajectories of HM in five cohorts of at-risk infants and one control cohort, followed from ages 2 to 10 months: 25 West syndrome (WS), 13 preterm birth (PB), 16 orality disorder (OD), 14 with visually impaired mothers (VIM), 7 early hospitalization (EH), and 19 typically developing infants (TD). Video-recorded data were collected in three different structured interactive contexts. Descriptors of the hand motion were used to examine the extent to which HM were associated with age and cohort. We obtained four principal results: (i) the kinematics of HM (spatial use, curvature, acceleration, and velocity) were significantly associated with age in all cohorts; (ii) HM significantly differed at 5-6 months of age in TD infants, depending on the context; (iii) environmental and developmental factors shaped the developmental trajectories of HM in different cohorts: environment for VIM, development for PB and WS, and both factors for OD and; (iv) the curvatures of HM showed atypical development in WS infants when developmental age was considered. These findings support the importance of using kinematics of HM to identify very early developmental disorders in an interactive context and would allow early prevention and intervention for at-risk infants.

Pre-linguistic Vocal Trajectories at 6-18 Months of Age As Early Markers of Autism.

This study explores pre-linguistic vocal trajectories in infants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during caregiver-infant interaction. Home videos were obtained from 10 infants with ASD and 10 typically developing infants (TD), covering three time periods: 0-6 months (T1, 47 video sequences), 6-12 months (T2, 47 video sequences), and 12-18 months (T3, 48 video sequences). In total 142 video sequences were analyzed. Vocalizations, long reduplicated babbling, 2-syllable babbling, and first words were investigated longitudinally. Face-gazing was also analyzed, to evaluate the social quality of vocal behaviors. Results show a lower rate of vocalizations in the ASD group at T2, and a lower rate of first words at T3, compared to the TD group. However, the prevalence of non-social babbling, appeared higher in the ASD group. The implications of these findings for screening programs are discussed.