Cataloguing and characterizing interests in typically developing toddlers and toddlers who develop <scp>ASD</scp>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intense interests are common in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and little research has characterized aspects of interests that are unique to or shared among children with and without ASD. We aimed to characterize interests in a sample of infants at high-familial-risk (HR) and low-familial-risk (LR) for ASD using a novel interview. Participants included HR siblings who were diagnosed with ASD at 24 months (HR-ASD, n = 56), HR siblings who did not receive an ASD diagnosis at 24 months (HR-Neg, n = 187), and a LR comparison group (n = 109). We developed and collected data with the Intense Interests Inventory at 18- and 24-months of age, a semi-structured interview that measures intensity and peculiarity of interests in toddlers and preschool-aged children. Intensity of interests differed by familial risk at 24 months, with HR-ASD and HR-Neg groups demonstrating equivalent intensity of interests that were higher than the LR group. By contrast, peculiarity of interest differed by ASD diagnosis, with the HR-ASD group showing more peculiar interests than the HR-Neg and LR groups at 24 months. At 18 months the HR-ASD group had more peculiar interests than the LR group, though no differences emerged in intensity of interests. This measure may be useful in identifying clinically-relevant features of interests in young children with ASD. We also replicated previous findings of males showing more intense interests at 18 months in our non-ASD sample. These results reveal new information about the nature of interests and preoccupations in the early autism phenotype. LAY SUMMARY: Intense interests are common in young children with autism and their family members. Intense interests are also prevalent among typically-developing children, and especially boys. Here we catalog interests and features of these interests in a large sample of toddlers enriched for autism risk. Children who had family members with autism had more intense interests, and those who developed autism themselves had more unusual interests at 24 months. These results highlight the importance of different aspects of interest in autism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".