This manuscript shortly introduces a methodological proposal regarding how human beings process multimodal information at early ages in life. It specifically examines to what extent different developmental scenarios may lead to different trajectories of this capacity. Infants at genetic risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder (sibs-ASD, from now on) are at higher risk than the general population for either presenting ASD or showing subclinical traits. Due, firstly, to the genetic liability of the disorder and, secondly, to available evidence showing multimodal processing impairments in diagnosed individuals at several ages, sibs-ASD seem to represent an atypical situation of development particularly interesting to track the course of the ability. Although there is a lack of evidence explicitly exploring it in that sample as well as in ASD on the whole, many recently published works use multimodal stimuli to test how sibs-ASD process social information. Here we propose a meta-analysis that, although it is still unconcluded, aims to reorganize indirect evidence and shed light not only on the early development of multimodal processing in siblings-ASD, but also on methodological and theoretical issues related to the study of this crucial human ability.
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