How Walking Shapes Social Proximity in Infants at Typical vs. Elevated Likelihood for ASD

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Abstract

Learning to walk changes how infants explore their everyday environment and engage in social interactions with caregivers. Compared to crawling, walking allows infants to travel greater distances at faster speeds and enjoy broader visual access to their surroundings (e.g., Kretch, Franchak, & Adolph, 2014). Little is known, however, about how infants balance increased access to the distal physical environment with ongoing social interactions proximal to adults. Does the time that infants spend proximal to, or in physical contact with, social partners change after they begin to walk?
Infants who have an elevated likelihood (EL) of developing autism spectrum disorder (by virtue of having an affected sibling; ASD) often experience motor delays (Estabillo, Matson & Jiang, 2016). Specifically, EL infants starting walking about 1-1.5 months later than infants with a typical likelihood of developing ASD (TL; i.e., no immediate family history of ASD). Consequently, EL infants may not reap the same benefits that the transition to walking engenders for their neurotypical peers. Do EL and TL infants differ in the time they spent proximal to adults across the transition from crawling to walking?
We examined these questions in 75 EL and 24 TL infants who were observed monthly during everyday activities at home as part of a larger longitudinal study. As a group, EL infants walked later than TL infants, but this difference was not significant. At 36 months, 10 EL infants received an ASD diagnosis, 22 exhibited Language Delay (LD) but not ASD, and 43 received No Diagnosis (ND). We focused on a 10-minute observation during the final month when all infants were crawling and first month of walking. Each session was divided into sixty 10 s intervals, in which coders identified whether infants were within (proximal) or beyond (distal) arm’s reach of an adult (see Figure 1) and whether they engaged in manual (e.g. touching a caregiver with their hands) or whole-body physical contact (e.g., sitting in a caregivers’ lap). Coders also identified the initiator of transitions in proximity states (e.g., infant moved into or out of arm’s reach of an adult) and physical contact.
Infants spent the majority of the crawling session (M = 66.77%, SD = 28.46) and walking session (M = 63.10%, SD = 26.22) proximal to an adult. The percentage of intervals with proximity transitions increased slightly between sessions, though not significantly (M crawling = 6.63%, SD = 5.22; M walking = 8.21%, SD = 5.70, p > .05). There were no differences between outcome groups on either of these measures. Similarly, the percentages of intervals with infant-initiated proximity transitions and infant-initiated physical contact also did not differ between outcome groups or across sessions.
These findings suggest that EL and TL infants spent similar amounts of time close to, and in physical contact with, their social partners. Moreover, patterns of social proximity did not change across the transition to walking for any group. Thus, although many aspects of social interactions differ among infants with ASD (e.g., Jones et al., 2014), physical proximity may not.

Authors

• Qi Chen, Nationwide Children's Hospital
  Presenting Author

• Joshua L Schneider, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kelsey L West, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jana M Iverson, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author