Brain Habit

Autism is highly variable in its manifestation across individuals. Neurobiological processes underlying development of autism are reflected in multiple features, from behaviour and cognition to brain functioning. One paper from my PhD work on this just came out on Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience. This study examines cognitive and adaptive functioning and symptoms of autism in the first three years of life in infants at a typical and a higher likelihood of being diagnosed with autism, and measures of how much the brain responds to a human face at 8 months of age. We used linked independent component analysis, a method that integrates the measures under investigation to extract patterns of variation across these measures linked across functional domains and across development, and selected the patterns significantly associated with clinical diagnosis at 3 years. Unlike retrospective group comparisons, the traditional approach used in developmental psychology, our approach does not...