Lonnie Zwaigenbaum and Susan Bryson, at the University of Alberta, were some of the first researchers to track the very earliest stages in the emergence of Autism Spectrum Disorders. They did this by identifying a cohort of high-risk infants, and tracking them longitudinally, from birth. By the time they were three, a proportion of these infants had received Autism diagnoses. They then went back to look at how those infants who subsequently received diagnoses were different at birth from those who didn’t.
One of the things to come out of this research is that one early markers of children who’re going to develop Autism is that they show early abnormalities in attention control (concentration, in layman’s terms). They are not so good at shifting the focus of their concentration in a rapid and time-sensitive way. Lonnie and Susan suggested that this early abnormality can make it harder for these children to ‘make sense’ of the complex visual and auditory information that is presented, typically, in social situations. This, in turn, leads to them avoiding social interactions, which leads to a cascade of other problems.
As part of a new large-scale clinical trial, that has just received funding from the Azrieli Foundation/Brain Canada, Lonnie and Sue are using the computerised attention training techniques that I devised as one component in an intervention battery for young children at high risk of developing Autism. I shall be supervising the integration of the training that I designed into their pre-existing program, the Social ABCs.
Dr Sam Wass's Research Blog 