Novel approaches for understanding the nature of face processing in emerging ASD

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.org/program/), I presented together with 3 fellow early-stage researchers on novel analytic approaches that promote an understanding of transdiagnostic domains in developmental research, with a specific focus on processing of social stimuli in 4-to-8 month-old infants. The studies presented there investigated the social-communication domain in typical development and emerging ASD using innovative techniques that allow us to improve our understanding of early brain development beyond clinical categories, and to address the emerging need in developmental neuroscience to investigate mechanisms at the level of the individual.

You can find my presentation below, where I show how individual-level approaches can help to understand and reduce heterogeneity in clinical cohorts. In particular, I introduce machine-learning methods to examine the domain of face processing at an individual level, moving from group-level comparisons, to supervised pattern recognition for prediction of later ASD diagnosis, and Bayesian hierarchical clustering for stratification into subgroups. This highlights the potential of novel tools to improve our understanding of brain development in a more dimensional way by means of individual-level research, enhancing our current categorical understanding of infant development.

Tye, C.*, Bussu, G.*, Gliga, T., Elsabbagh, M., Pasco, G., Johnsen, K., Charman, T., Jones, E.J.H.#, Buitelaar, J.K.#, Johnson, M.H.#, and the BASIS team. 2020. Understanding the nature of face processing in early autism: A prospective study. MedRxiv doi: 10.1101/2020.05.06.20092619 *shared first authorship #shared last authorship

Comments

Autism spectrum: A quick peek to possible causes.

One of my resolutions for this new year is to put a bigger effort into science outreach. That's why I decided to adjust my aims and changed the topic and format of this blog accordingly. I also started a new account on Instagram for sharing approachable science news, ideas and articles about brain, development and mental health. https://www.instagram.com/brainhabit/ The same topic will be covered in a blog post here at the end of the week, wrapping up on everything I shared during the week and citing references. For this first week of 2021, I decided to start with the main topic of my research, which is Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). As a researcher in the autism field, I would like to help people know more about ASD, its origins, manifestation and development. It is a huge field of research, so you might understand that there is a lot to say. Here, I will introduce ASD starting from its diagnostic definition and will provide a quick overview of the current ideas in terms of possi...

Introduction to the human brain

During one of my classes for 1st year Bachelor in Psychology, a student told me that he was interested in behaviour, and he could not understand why he had to focus so much on the brain. To answer this question, I like to dive a bit into philosophy. Many philosophers, in fact, have dealt with the causes of behaviour. Their speculations can be divided into 3 main perspectives that have influenced the development of modern psychology: 🔴 Mentalism [e.g., Aristotle]: a person's mind (psyche) is a separate identity responsible for behaviour. This perspective has influenced modern behavioural science. 🔴 Dualism [e.g., Descartes]: behaviour is controlled by 2 entities, a mind and a body, that interact with each other. The mind receives information about the body and the world from the brain, and then it gives directives to the brain. 🔴 Materialism [e.g., Darwin]: behaviour can be measured objectively and consciousness is created in terms of physical properties of the brain. Man...

Sins of the mother shall not be visited upon the children

Fetal programming is the process by which early environment interacts with genes to produce an individual human constitution. It is not only of great interest to developmental scientists but also has high media resonance due to the more and more commonly acknowledged notion that pregnancy actually affects vulnerability to disease later in life. First evidence came from an epidemiological study showing that birth characteristics, like low weight and lower gestational age, were linked to later diseases like diabetes, hypertension, but also psychopathology. What is currently accepted, though, is that these individual characteristics at birth are not the actual risk factors for later disease but rather is the environment to which the mother and the fetus are exposed during pregnancy that affects fetal development itself and in turn development later in life. There comes the focus of this post on actual prenatal conditions that may increase the risk for disease later in life, with a...

Brain Habit

Search This Blog