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Many studies have reported that children with autism have an impaired ability to imitate gestures and to follow the direction of another person's gaze towards interesting objects. These two elements may be a key to the development of social integration, in particular the ability to understand the intentions of other people, which is thought to be linked to the social and linguistic impairments characteristic of autism. This longitudinal study of normally developing infants from 1-4 months old explores individual differences in performance on early imitation, joint attention and genuine imitation to examine whether performance on these three tasks is related. The results suggest that early imitation is not related to gaze following.

Key findings

• Several experiments showed that early imitation is not related to gaze following. Instead, auditory and visual attention were related to gaze following. Infants tended to acquire gaze following first, then they learned to turn their head towards a sound and finally to show a preference for looking at people rather than objects.
• Although gaze following is not related to early imitation, it is related to visual and auditory attention and babies tend to perform gaze following before they perform these other tasks.
• Head gestures were imitated far less frequently than the facial gestures of sticking out the tongue and opening the mouth. 
• Three-month old babies are reliably able to follow the direction of gaze. Younger babies as a group did not, but some individuals did so.
• The proportion of babies who passed the auditory attention task (turning the head towards a sound) increased with age, but it was only at four months that the number of babies performing the task was significantly greater than those who did not.
• Many children passed gaze following without ever showing the ability to imitate facial gestures.  

About the study

A series of experiments were conducted with a group of 92 infants from 1-4 months old. In every session the children were tested for facial imitation, gaze following, visual attention and auditory attention. Not all infants completed the tasks and the final sample was 60 infants. The procedure for oral and head imitation tasks involved two oral gestures and two head gestures. The gaze following experiment used two identical puppets to which the researcher attracted the child's attention. The visual attention task was designed to see whether an infant looked at a toy, the experimenter, the mother, or was unfocused, when a researcher held a toy and looked at the baby with a neutral expression. Finally, for the auditory test a second researcher sat to the side of the infant and produced four sounds - calling the baby's name or clapping hands, shaking a rattle or playing bells.

Key words

Autism, gaze following, babies 

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