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Abstract We measured infants' recognition of familiar and unfamiliar 3‐D objects and their 2‐D representations using event‐related potentials (ERPs). Infants differentiated familiar from unfamiliar objects when viewing them in both two and three dimensions. However, differentiation between the familiar and novel objects occurred more quickly when infants viewed the object in 3‐D than when they viewed 2‐D representations. The results are discussed with respect to infants' recognition abilities and their understanding of real objects and representations. This is the first study using 3‐D objects in conjunction with ERPs in infants, and it introduces an interesting new methodology for assessing infants' electrophysiological responses to real objects.

Abstract Data on typically developing children suggest a link between social interaction and language learning, a finding of interest both to theories of language and theories of autism. In this study, we examined social and linguistic processing of speech in preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing chronologically matched (TDCA) and mental age matched (TDMA) children. The social measure was an auditory preference test that pitted 'motherese' speech samples against non‐speech analogs of the same signals. The linguistic measure was phonetic discrimination assessed with mismatch negativity (MMN), an event‐related potential (ERP). As a group, children with ASD differed from controls by: (a) demonstrating a preference for the non‐speech analog signals, and (b) failing to show a significant MMN in response to a syllable change. When ASD children were divided into subgroups based on auditory preference, and the ERP data reanalyzed, ASD children who preferred non‐speech still failed to show an MMN, whereas ASD children who preferred motherese did not differ from the controls. The data support the hypothesis of an association between social and linguistic processing in children with ASD.

AbstractEvidence suggests that autism is associated with impaired emotion perception, but it is unknown how early such impairments are evident. Furthermore, most studies that have assessed emotion perception in children with autism have required verbal responses, making results difficult to interpret. This study utilized high‐density event‐related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether 3–4‐year‐old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show differential brain activity to fear versus neutral facial expressions. It has been shown that normal infants as young as 7 months of age show differential brain responses to faces expressing different emotions. ERPs were recorded while children passively viewed photos of an unfamiliar woman posing a neutral and a prototypic fear expression. The sample consisted of 29 3–4‐year‐old children with ASD and 22 chronological age‐matched children with typical development. Typically developing children exhibited a larger early negative component (N300) to the fear than to the neutral face. In contrast, children with ASD did not show the difference in amplitude of this early ERP component to the fear versus neutral face. For a later component, typically developing children exhibited a larger negative slow wave (NSW) to the fear than to the neutral face, whereas children with autism did not show a differential NSW to the two stimuli. In children with ASD, faster speed of early processing (i.e. N300 latency) of the fear face was associated with better performance on tasks assessing social attention (social orienting, joint attention and attention to distress). These data suggest that children with ASD, as young as 3 years of age, show a disordered pattern of neural responses to emotional stimuli.