Publications by authors named "A Ronald"
Objective: Being among the youngest in a school class increases the risk for worse educational outcomes and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, but questions remain about the nature and persistence of such effects. We investigated this "relative age effect" on educational achievement at age 15 to 16 years and on ADHD symptoms from age 7 to age 21 years. Furthermore, we examined whether being young-in-class is linked to a greater reduction in ADHD symptoms from childhood to adulthood and a lower genetic propensity to ADHD.
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- - Infants exhibit varying levels of eye movement control, which may be related to autism risks; a study involving 450 twins assessed this using an eye-tracking task.
- - Findings indicated that shorter eye movement latency in certain task conditions correlates with higher levels of autistic traits reported by parents when the children reached 2 years old.
- - The results suggest that a significant portion of differences in eye movement latency can be attributed to a heritable factor, with distinct genetic influences at play for visual attention versus basic visual processing abilities.
Background: Characteristics of parent-child interaction (PCI) early in life have been associated with later development in the child. Twin studies can help to disentangle child contributions to parent-child interaction, for example, by assessing the influence of the child's genetics on his/her social environment, which includes parental behaviour.
Methods: Infant twins from a community sample [354 monozygotic (MZ), 268 same-sex dizygotic (DZ)] were assessed in terms of PCI at age 5 months.
Article Synopsis
- There is increasing awareness that signs of autism can emerge beyond the first three years of life, raising questions about the impact of age at diagnosis on developmental trajectories.
- Research using data from four birth cohorts reveals two distinct socio-emotional behavior patterns linked to the age when autism is diagnosed.
- The study also finds that the age at diagnosis has a heritable component and is related to genetic factors, suggesting a complex relationship between autism, the timing of diagnosis, and co-occurring conditions like ADHD and mental health issues.