A Study on Children at Risk for Having Autism Spectrum Disorder

Method

Participants of this study were gathered through ongoing studies that were focused on young children at risk for having autism spectrum disorder. The studies were done at the University of Michigan Autism and Communication Disorders Center (UMACC). Some children that were already currently being screened at the clinic were used in the study. Also, fliers were posted in local day cares to request additional children for the typically developing group. Each child, ASD and TD alike, had to complete a familiar object entry task so the researchers could gather children that were appropriate for the testing. During this small entry task, the child was presented with one known object and two distracters. The child was then asked to demonstrate a simple action introduced by the researcher like, for example, “Can you put the dog in the bucket?” The conclusion from this simple task was that if the child was unable to preform this task with a known object, the results from the rest of the tests with unknown objects would be meaningless and invalid. The children that failed to complete the entry task were excluded from the study. These children that did not pass the entry task were developmentally younger and had lower IQs than those who did pass. The final count of participants was 21 children with ASD and 21 TD children (Luyster, R et al., 2009).

The children were administered a series of three experimental assessments to score their ability to identify and retain the names of novel objects. The investigator first started with the novel training phase where the investigator interacted with the child while moving an object in front of the child’s face while assigning a name to the object. For example, in one instance he said, “Tha...

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...imilar to discrepant assessment, except that a second set of novel objects was used (i.e., the investigator sat opposite the child and placed the child’s toy in the hand of child and placed the investigator’s toy in her own palm). In this test, rather than focus on her object while she spoke, the examiner faced forward, gazing directly toward the child and the child’s toy at the time that she introduced the novel label. The investigator began each phrase-triplet only when the child was looking at his or her own toy, and the same procedure was used in the delivery of the phrase-triplets (Luyster, R et al., 2009, p. 1779).

The independent variable in these studies would be the child’s focus on his/her toy because in each study, the child was consistently focused on their own toy. The independent variable would be the gaze of the investigator and the sets of toys used