The study was conducted using high-technology eye-tracking headgear and software that measures with precision the point at which a child is looking when learning a task. Researchers used an actor to demonstrate a task on a computer screen.

“We found that the children with autism focused on the demonstrator’s action and looked at the demonstrator’s face much less often than did typically developing children,” said Giacomo Vivanti, a postdoctoral researcher at the M.I.N.D. Institute and the study’s lead author. “The typically developing children may be looking at the demonstrator’s face to check for information on what to do or how to respond appropriately, information that the children with autism are less inclined to seek. This is an important finding, because children with autism have difficulty learning from others. This might be one key to why that is so,” Vivanti said.

Imitation plays an important role in how children learn, as well as in how people interact socially, said M.I.N.D. Institute researcher and senior study author Sally J. Rogers, who has been studying imitation impairment and autism for more than 20 years. “This is a trait we see as early as we can diagnose autism, and it’s one of the traits that is present even in mildly impaired adults,” Rogers said.

Impaired imitation leads to additional impairments in sharing emotions, pretend play, pragmatic communication and understanding the emotional states of others. For years, scientists thought that children with autism and related disorders had trouble with learning through imitation because they had poor motor skills or because they did not pay attention to the action being performed. The current study rules out these hypotheses.

“We now understand more about how this imitation deficit might be working and, after more study, we may actually be able to address it in a way that helps children with autism develop a more natural set of behaviors,” said Rogers, a UC Davis professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

In the current study, which was published online in June and will appear in print in November in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 18 children aged 8 to 15 with high-functioning autism were carefully matched with a group of 13 typically developing children. While wearing special eye-tracking headgear, the children were shown video clips that ranged from seven to 19 seconds in length. After viewing each clip, the children performed the demonstrated action. The results confirm previous research that shows that children with autism have difficulty imitating tasks when compared to normally developing children. It also showed that children with autism paid just as much attention to the action being performed as the other children in the study, ruling out previous hypotheses about poor attention to the task.

“This finding is particularly important,” Rogers said. “Now we can rule out this variable. We know these children are looking at the task.”

Researchers also found that successful performance of a task by children with autism increases with the amount of time they study it but is not correlated with their basic motor skills, ruling out the possibility that it is a lack of motor ability causing the imitation effect.

Finally, the study showed that both groups of children shifted their attention from the action to the demonstrator’s face, but the children with autism did this much less often.
According to Rogers, this finding suggests that imitation is not just about repeating an action, but understanding the reason for the action.

“That information is conveyed in our faces,” she explained.

Rogers and Vivanti are continuing to try to understand how this difference in looking at faces affects more complex forms of learning and understanding.

“We are looking at how children look at emotions and intentions that are conveyed in a demonstrator’s face and how looking at this information in faces or not looking at them may affect how they understand and imitate the observed actions,” Vivanti said.

Based on these studies, Vivanti and Rogers hope to one day develop studies aimed at determining whether or not face-looking is an important part of the imitation process. “It could be that if people with autism could be better at reading emotion they might naturally start to imitate their models the way like other people do,” Rogers said. “If it’s about how people understand the information in a face, then it gives you a target for intervention.”

This is the first study to examine an association between better air ventilation in infants’ bedrooms and reduced SIDS risk.

The finding is consistent with previous research that showed factors influencing a baby’s sleep environment may change SIDS risk. Among those factors are sleeping on the stomach and soft bedding, both of which may limit air ventilation around an infant’s breathing pathway and thus increase the chance of re-breathing exhaled carbon dioxide, said the researchers.

They explained that fan use is no substitute for practices known to reduce the risk for sudden infant death syndrome, which include: always placing infants to sleep on their backs, putting infants to sleep on firm mattresses and avoiding soft bedding materials like comforters and quilts, providing a separate sleep environment, preventing infants from overheating, and not smoking around infants.

“Although this is the first finding linking fan use to SIDS, concerned parents can take measures to improve ventilation of infants sleep environment, by adding fans in rooms or opening windows. Other studies have found that parents can also reduce the chance of re-breathing carbon dioxide by putting infants to sleep on their back, avoiding soft bedding and overheating, and by using a pacifier,” said study author Dr. De-Kun Li, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research in Oakland.

The study also found that opening a window in infant’s room reduced the risk of SIDS by 36 percent compared to babies who slept in a room with closed windows, though this connection was not statistically significant according to the researchers.

“More studies need to be done to determine the exact relationship between the types of ventilation and the risks of SIDS,” said Li, who also authored a 2006 study in the British Medical Journal that found that using a pacifier can reduce SIDS risk by 90 percent.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, this latest study looked at 185 babies who died from SIDS in 10 Northern California counties and Los Angeles County from 1997 to 2000. They were compared to 312 infants of a similar age and from similar socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds in the same counties. Researchers identified SIDS cases through records from the California Department of Health Services and the Los Angeles County coroner’s office and interviewed participating mothers by trained interviewers in English and Spanish with an average of 3.8 months after the baby’s death.

SIDS is the leading cause of death among infants aged 1 to 12 months, and the third leading cause of overall infant mortality in the United States. SIDS is defined as sudden death of an infant under the age of 1, which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation, including an autopsy, examination of the death scene and a review of clinical history.

“Though this needs to be studied further before we can make clinical recommendations, this finding is consistent with the other factors that we know impact the SIDS risk by influencing sleeping environment, such as prone sleep position, soft bedding, and use of a pacifier,” said Dr. Fern Hauck of the University of Virginia Health Systems, who is a SIDS researcher and an American Academy of Pediatrics SIDS Task Force member. Hauck was not involved with the Kaiser Permanente study.

“The finding that better ventilation had a greater reduced risk of SIDS in the presence of other risk factors affecting sleep environment (prone sleep position, bed sharing – other than parents — , high temperature, and not using pacifiers) further supports the hypothesis that environmental factors play a major role in SIDS risk,” Hauck said.