Student’s name: Kosma Chałas

SG 12

1. Give three example of how typically developing infants engage preferentially with what is social in the world around them?

   1. Attributing intentions to others

   2. Facial expression

   3. Gaze direction

2. Preferential attention to the eyes of others is disrupted for individuals with ASDs in the childhood years, but later does not occur.

   1. False

3. Explain (in your own words) Figure 2 on page 949 in the Jones et al. (2008) article.

Figure 2 shows, how opposing to the normally developing children, or children with developmental disabilities other the autism, toddlers with autism tends to focus their attention on mouth region, rather than eye region of human face.

1. Mutual gaze, gaze following, and even language acquisition are parts of a progressively more complex social interaction that has its beginnings in eye contact with others.

2. Why is preferential attention to biological motion important for adaptive interactions with other living beings?

It is evolutionarily well-conserved, developmentally early-emerging, highly robust in signal detection (withstanding degradation on signaling and receiving sides), and redundantly represented by several sensory modalities mechanism. Each of these aspects suggests ready benefits for adaptive interaction with other living beings: following the movements of a conspecific, looking at others to entreat or avoid interaction, learning by imitation, or directing preferential attention to cues that build on biological motion (such as facial expression and gaze direction

1. Summarize (in your own words) the reason why results for the pat-a-cake animation were different from results for the other animations (Figure 2 in the Klin et al. (2009) article).

This animation had synchronized audiovisual stimuli (two hands colliding creating a sound)in the up-right corner. Children with autism showed significant preference for the up-right figure.