From NY Times twitter feed, http://t.co/smZBQimdUY:

Scientists are reporting the earliest behavioral sign to date that a child is likely to develop autism: when and how long a baby looks at other people’s eyes.

In a study published Wednesday, researchers using eye-tracking technology found that 3-year-olds diagnosed with autism looked less at people’s eyes when they were babies than children who did not develop autism.

But contrary to what the researchers expected, the difference was not apparent at birth. It emerged when babies were two to six months old, and autism experts said that may suggest a window during which the progression toward autism can be halted or slowed.

The study, published online in the journal Nature, found that infants later diagnosed with autism began spending less time looking at people’s eyes between two and six months of age and paid less and less attention to eyes as they grew older. By contrast, babies who did not develop autism looked increasingly at people’s eyes until about nine months old, and then kept their attention to eyes fairly constant into toddlerhood.

“This paper is a major leap forward,” said Dr. Lonnie Zwaigenbaum, a pediatrician and autism researcher at the University of Alberta, who was not involved in the study. “Documenting that there’s a developmental difference between two and six months is a major, major finding.”

The authors, Warren R. Jones and Ami Klin, both of the Marcus Autism Center and Emory University, also found that babies who showed the steepest decline in looking at people’s eyes over time developed the most severe autism….

Dr. Jones and Dr. Klin, who directs the autism center, studied two groups of babies. One group was at high risk for autism, with a 20 times greater likelihood of developing it because they had siblings with the disorder. The other group was at low risk, with no relatives with autism.

The researchers assessed 110 children, from two months to two years of age, ten times while watching videos of friendly women acting like playful caregivers. Eye-tracking technology traced when the babies looked at the women’s eyes, mouths and bodies, as well as toys or other objects in the background. At age three, the children were evaluated for autism. Ultimately, researchers used data from 36 boys, 11 of whom developed autism. (They excluded data from girls because only two developed autism.)

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