Autism during Infancy

Abstract The chapter describes a study, “Autism during Infancy: A Retrospective Video Analysis of the Sensory-Motor and Social Behaviors at 9–12 Months of Age,” that used retrospective video analysis to identify several sensory-motor and social behaviors that discriminated between children with autism, children with developmental disabilities, and neurotypical children between the ages of 9 and 12 months. There were 19 boys and 13 girls whose families had taken high-quality home videos of them. Nine categories of behaviors were identified and coded: affective expressions, looking, gaze aversion, response to name, social touch responses, anticipatory posture, motor stereotypies, object stereotypes, and sensory modulation. This was the first retrospective study to identify early sensory-motor indicators of autism in children.