Development and Autism Part 1

The Developmental Importance of Predictability and Agency

Upon being born into this world, the infant faces a plethora of stimuli emerging in an unorganized and chaotic manner. Prenatally, the infant has developed certain perceptual and sensory abilities that are able to encode these stimuli. The way in which these stimuli are integrated, synthesized and consolidated must, however, develop in synchrony with the specific experiences extracted from the postnatal world.

Observing contingent feedback cycles can be extremely engaging. Objects in an infant’s world are usually marked by their sensory stimulating characteristics. Toys and books tend to be colorful with interesting sound or visual effects. A typical infant will be positively stimulated both by these toys but also by the caretaker interacting with these toys. One example is a caretaker shaking a rattle. An infant watching this procedure will enjoy the sequences of events as they slowly become predictable: every time the caretaker shakes, the rattle makes a noise. Another example is the objectless event of peek-a-boo, a game most infants enjoy tirelessly. The infant watches carefully as the caretaker disappears and reappears behind their hands. As the events become more predictable the infant habituates, but if the caretaker switches up speed and latency to disappear and reappear possibly adding stimulating sounds to the whole procedure, the infant will show great interest and pleasure.

One of the first ways infants make sense of the world is through the recognition of contingencies. Infants as young as 3 months display a sensitivity to contingent events and actively partake in the regulation of such contingencies (Watson, 1966). These relations between events allow the infant to form a sense of predictability.

Predictability in an unknown, chaotic world is assumed to be inherently rewarding and comforting to any sentient organism. An infant predicting that when it cries its caretaker will appear soon after lends structure to a potentially random muddle of events. Predicting sequences of events allows categorizations to occur, in which certain events, objects or social agents are predicted to appear either in concert, sequence or asynchronously. Categorizing certain elements as either belonging together or not can help organize the entropy of stimuli. In the example in which infant crying produces caretaker appearance, predictability can also give rise to a sense of agency.

Predictability paired with agency allows the infant, though comparatively unable by adult standards, to learn that it can actively make things happen. Various researchers have documented these contingent events created and regulated by young infants (Gergely & Watson, 1999; Nagy & Molnar, 2004; Watson, 1967). Caretakers themselves have been shown to unconsciously mimic their infants’ facial expressions creating first instances of action-reaction relations inherently controlled by the infant’s activities (S. S. Jones, 2006).

In typically developing infants, the sense of predictability and agency is used to soothe physiological needs such as hunger, excretion and temperature regulation. As the infant develops into a social actor, predictability and agency can also be used to invite certain social interactions, such as caretaker appearance, holding, mimicry, or play.

When describing the tendencies of typical versus atypical infants, thinking of such agency-producing behaviors as part of an early approach/withdrawal system can prove to be useful (Tinbergen, 1973). Before an infant can actively move itself by crawling or walking, it can use other behaviors to essentially “approach” social situations by making them appear. As motoric abilities develop, the infant can more directly and physically approach social interactions. An atypically developing infant, however, may not be able to form the same kinds of contingent relationships between certain types of events, and thus not experience the same kind of reward during certain sequences of events. For these reasons, an atypically developing infant may want to withdraw from or avoid certain events in which the chaos has not been organized into predictable sequences. This infant, unable to perceive typical contingencies, may be highly sensitive to perceiving and understanding the one contingency that allows some sensory respite, namely, the kind that enables withdrawal or avoidance.

In autism, young individuals have been described both academically and by their caretakers as experts at regulating their environments in a way that permits social and stimulatory isolation (Clancy & McBride, 2005). These individuals thus use the same contingency comprehension to create methods of withdrawal and avoidance rather than approach. Predictability and agency in autism seem to remain rewarding. The question then becomes one addressing the kinds of circumstances that are achieved once predictability and agency enable social isolation. In other words, what exactly about social isolation is rewarding to these individuals?

Researchers are tirelessly aiming to pinpoint what in development occurs to create such a need to avoid typically approachable circumstances. The current response attempts to go over some of the research done to analyze this phenomenon, and to provide possible explanations for how certain atypical developmental aspects can lead to behavioral phenotypes specialized in social avoidance.

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Continue onto Part 2 of the Series Development and Autism