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As a participatory team of autistic and non-autistic researchers, we support Jaswal & Akhtar's (J&A's) critique of the social motivation theory of autism and agree that there are compelling alternative explanations of atypical behaviors in autism. We also advocate for greater inclusion of autistic people as research participants and researchers (see Milton 2014). We believe that J&A's argument could be strengthened by a broader focus on the developmental origins of autistic people's domain-general challenges and experiences with others (see Kapp 2013). This commentary expands upon the article's evidence, methods, and suggestions for interventions and further research.
Low eye contact was among the four behaviors analyzed by J&A, and through it we extend their view that autism relates to sensory, perceptual, attentional, and motor systems. Infant sibling and other developmental autism research suggests that differences in these systems emerge at least as early as atypical social behaviors and may underlie them (Gallagher & Varga 2015; Gliga et al. 2014; Rogers 2009). For example, atypically high eye contact and social attention within the first seven months predicts autism as well as face recognition, language, and motor difficulties in toddlers (Jones & Klin 2013; Klerk et al. 2014; Pineda et al. 2015; Young et al. 2009). This apparent paradox of strong early social responsiveness to caregivers’ faces, such as eye contact, predicting autism (Clifford et al. 2013; Del Rosario et al. 2014; Rozga et al. 2011; Zappella et al. 2015), with diminished responsiveness predicting infant siblings who fail to...