By contrast, the percentage of time spent in the vicinity of the parent was of limited value and showed no relation with any of the measures. Latency to approach the parent was, however, linked to overall adaptive social communication skills as well as to the ADOS G Social Affect and Comparison scores indicating that those with better communication skills were more likely to quickly approach or be near their parent once the examiner left the room. Thus, both latency to approach the parent and the percentage of time the child spends in the periphery of a room may serve as objective indicators of autism severity, important measures to study as possible predictors of the development of ASD in at risk children, and as indicators of the effects of intervention. Ideally, intervention would shorten the parent latency as well as the time spent in the periphery e. Lets talk video tracking. If you know Noldus, you probably know EthoVision XT our premier video tracking software. The new EthoVision XT allows you to annotate any. ASD child look like the path of the Not ASD child in Figure 5. Ronda Rousey. Both latency and duration measures were invariant across the pre and post ADOS assessment time periods. In animal studies, the tendency to prefer the periphery of an open field is referred to as thigmotaxis and usually serves as an indicator of anxiety 2. In this study, there was no significant correlation between parent reports of fears on the PDDBI and percentage of time spent in the periphery. Instead, there was an association between percentage of time spent in the periphery and stereotyped behaviors, as well as with measures of arousal regulation and irritability. It may be that children with ASD, when introduced into a novel room, spend the time exploring the periphery because that is where the interesting sensory stimuli are in our case, the one way mirror, storage cabinets, covered toys, and walls. It could also be that engaging in such behavior serves as a means of regulation of their arousal andor anxiety which is known to be elevated in children on the autism spectrum 2. RAV was the one measure that differed across time periods with a marked increase in velocity in the second observation period relative to the first and moving from a neutral bias to a left sided bias but only in the ASD group. It is unclear why the overall increase in turning rate occurred but could be related to an overflow of arousal generated by the social demands of ADOS testing for the ASD group. This may account for the observation that the clinicians ratings of social affect on the ADOS were correlated more with the second time period than the first. Indeed, RAV after the ADOS was strongly associated with diagnosis in this sample. Based on the work of Bracha et al. RAV to be linked with ratings of stereotyped behaviors in the ASD group. These authors reported that spinning in children with ASD had a left turn bias which they attributed to right sided neglect. However, we did not see a link with ratings of stereotyped behaviors in the ASD group but this was largely because they showed relatively little variation in RAV. Instead, RAV was associated with parental reports of stereotyped behaviors and to social deficits in the Not ASD group where there was much greater variation in RAV across subjects. Finally, we acknowledge that the numbers of correlations within each table were quite large. As noted above, correction for multiple comparisons would have been too strict an approach for this exploratory study. A more informal approach toward handling this issue is to compare the expected number of significant effects for a P value of 0. Gelman, Hill, and Yajima 2. Tables 5 and 6 each had 1. Instead, Table 5 had 2. Table 6 had 2. 8. Table 7 would be expected to have four significant correlations by chance but 1. The expected chance significance rate was two for Table 8 and five for Table 9, but the actual numbers were 1. Based on these observations and the observed generalization across scales, we conclude that our results are likely to be valid.