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(Ivanhoe Newswire) Research has shown children with autism focus their attention on a persons mouth when someone is speaking rather than the eyes.
A new study out of Yale University is helping to explain the phenomenon and it all centers on the synchronicity between the movement of the mouth and the sound of the speech.
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The study began by presenting kids with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and kids without these disorders with animated images on a split video screen. On one half of the screen, the animation was presented upright and moving the forward. On the other half, the same animation appeared upside down and running in reverse. The soundtrack played normally on both halves.
Kids without ASD clearly favored the half of the screen where the animation was running normally. Kids with ASD seemed to jump back and forth between the two screens, spending about the same amount of time on each one. Further analysis, however, showed the ASD kids did seem to prefer the normal side of the screen in one section where the character played patty cake. The authors believe this is because the clapping associated with the game was synchronized with the movement on the screen in the normal version. In the upside down/reserve version, the clapping and movement were asynchronous.
When they looked more closely at the rest of the video, taking the synchronicity of audio and visual content into account, they found the ASD kids clearly favored sections where audio-visual synchronistic was part of the mix.
Audio-visual synchronies accounted for about 90 percent of the preferred viewing patterns of toddlers with ASD, study author Warren Jones, Ph.D., was quoted as saying.
SOURCE: Nature, published online March 29, 2009
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