Brain Habit

There is common recognition in the field of developmental psychiatry on the necessity for new approaches to research into the mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders. In particular, prospective studies of infants at elevated likelihood for these disorders hold the potential to transform our understanding of the mechanisms underlying symptom emergence. However, traditional analytic approaches examine differences between groups of infants defined retrospectively by current diagnostic categories, implicitly reinforcing existing clinical models. Among other neurodevelopmental disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterised by high variability across individuals. This heterogeneity makes it difficult to capture the complexity of the disorder when investigating it under a unitary diagnostic label. In the symposium entitled "New tools for understanding transdiagnostic domains in developmental research"  presented at vICIS 2020 last July ( https://infantstudies....

Talking about autism, people usually think about difficulties in social communication and restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviours, interests or activities. What is less commonly known is that people in the autism spectrum often experience sensory sensitivity symptoms, to the point that the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) has incorporated ‘hyper- or hypo-reactivity to sensory input or unusual interests in sensory aspects of the environment’ as possible symptoms. These sensory characteristics begin to emerge in infancy and can be noticed when parents say things like "My child startles easily at sound" or "My child is distressed having nails trimmed". This does not mean that every child startling easily at sounds is going to be autistic. Like any trait, sensory sensitivity is distributed as a continuum across the general population, and researchers don’t consider sensory alterations among possible causes for aut...