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associated with later ASDs included abnormalities in social attention, interaction,
communication and emotion (i.e., lack of social smiling, eye contact, and appropriate
facial expressions) as well as abnormalities in motor behaviors.
Osterling and Dawson (1994) and Werner, Dawson, Osterling, and Dinno
(2000) reported that infants who later developed autism showed significantly less eye
contact and less responsiveness to their name being called as well as impairments in
affect and in joint attention behaviors (i.e., showing and pointing) compared to
typically developing infants, during home video recordings of their first year birthday
parties and that furthermore, social deficits such as less orienting to their name or less
looking at the face of another while smiling in dyadic interactions, already appeared
in the home videos of these children which were taken between 8-10 months of age.
Osterling, Dawson, and Munson (2002) extended this work to include a group of
infants later diagnosed with intellectual disability, as well as a group of typically
developing infants, and found that infants in the ASD group looked at others and
oriented to their name less frequently than infants in the intellectual disability group.
Werner and Dawson (2005) separated out ASD infants with regression and those
without regression (sometimes called ‘early onset’ autism) and found that those with
no regression (‘early onset’) displayed fewer joint attention and communicative
behaviors compared to infants with autistic regression and infants with typical
development at 12 months. No significant differences emerged at 12 months between
infants with ASDs who experienced regression and infants with typical development
in the use of joint attention, and indeed children with ASDs who experienced
regression had more frequent use of words and babble compared to infants with no
regression. This study for the first time used the home video methodology to
corroborate the parental report of intact early skills followed by an apparent loss of