A Novel Quantitative Framework to Study Lack of Social Interactions in Autism

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(公法111-5)资助的。据估计，全世界每166名儿童中就有1名患有自闭症谱系障碍，其患病率使其成为最常见的发育障碍。保守估计，在美国，超过40万人患有某种形式的自闭症。这些症状在生命早期就开始出现，并导致终生残疾，目前无法治愈。然而，早期干预有显著的改善，通过非常早期的强化行为治疗在恢复正常方面有一定程度的成功。所有患有自闭症的儿童在社会反应和沟通方面都存在缺陷。值得注意的是，这些孩子都不能正常地与他们的世界互动和发挥作用。他们不能参与富有想象力的、虚幻的游戏，也不能发起和维持与其他孩子的对话。原因尚不清楚，但越来越多的证据表明，受环境影响的大脑发育异常是导致这些症状的主要原因。目前还没有非侵入性的技术来测量他们的行为、眼球运动和面部表情。目前的筛查电池没有可用于诊断、治疗和纵向跟踪其进展的客观性能指标。没有根据日常生活任务中自然有意动作所表现的感觉运动缺陷将自闭症患者分为不同的亚组。该项目将提供一套非侵入性数据捕获技术和理论框架，以定义、模拟和实证量化社会互动问题的关键方面。这项研究将使用感觉-运动整合的几何特征来研究参照系在引导系统在给定情况下获得最充足的感觉输入来源方面的作用。正式理论公式背后的基本思想是，ASD系统在形成感觉图方面受到损害，因此它不能故意在基于内部和外部的感觉输入源之间切换视角；它不能使感觉图与关于不同感觉加工时间的信息对齐，并且通常它不能将来自不同内部-外部通道的感觉加工延迟与额外的感觉运动反馈延迟相结合。因此，自闭症系统不能有适当的身体意识；缺乏从不同角度投射相同场景的能力；缺乏将物理现实与精神现实分离的能力，缺乏抽象的能力；大多数情况下可以做出反应，但无法预测或预期自己的行动，更不用说其他人的行动或意图了。该理论产生了许多具体的、可检验的预测，这些预测将在罗格斯大学心理学和计算机科学的合作努力中得到解决。一组评估不同假设的心理物理实验将在患有自闭症的儿童和来自该大学道格拉斯发育障碍中心的正常发育同龄人中进行。这项研究将评估在日常生活活动中嵌入的故意行为期间的几个客观表现指标，并将操纵感觉指导的来源，以评估每天表现的潜在改善。由于这样的几何指数独立于运动动力学，以及执行任务时的新颖性或自动化程度，因此有可能解决自然的、不受约束的自愿行为，并客观地量化各种假设的正常社交互动的关键成分是如何在ASD中分解的。即使新的假设失败，这项研究也将有助于(1)开发和标准化非侵入性记录技术，供其他发展障碍研究人员使用；(2)评估一些目前尚未探索的问题；(3)提供新的实验范式，系统地研究自闭症人群中的这些问题。本研究项目将有助于显著提高我们对一般大脑机制的理解，这些机制控制行为，与社会环境中的互动和交流。据疾控中心表示，该项目将跨越多个领域，包括临床与发展心理学、特殊教育、职业治疗、计算机科学和应用数学，以应对流行病比例问题。这项研究中采取的测量方法将适当地适用于幼儿，以创建一种客观的诊断工具，帮助社会在三岁之前开始强化行为治疗。这一点很重要，因为自闭症的发病率和流行率很高，而且缺乏客观的筛查措施来及早发现和干预。此外，该项目将根据不同学龄组中感觉运动缺陷、卓越感知能力和学习能力的领域对自闭症儿童进行分组。这将为这些现象提供更完整的图景，并为其在发育中的人脑中的纵向进化提供新的见解。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is estimated to affect approximately 1 out of every 166 children around the world, with a prevalence rate that makes it the most common developmental disability. Conservative estimates report that in the US over 400,000 people have some forms of ASD. The symptoms start to appear early in life and result in a lifelong disability with no cure at present. However, significant improvements occur with early intervention and there is some degree of success at returning to normality upon very early intensive behavioral treatment. Common to all the children with ASD are deficits in social responsiveness and communication. Notably, none of these children can properly interact with and function in their world. They can not engage in imaginative, make-believe play and fail to initiate and sustain conversations with other children. The causes are unknown but growing evidence suggests that abnormal brain development influenced by their environment is in great part responsible for the symptoms. At present there are no non-invasive techniques to measure their behaviors, eye motions and facial expressions. There are no objective indexes of performance in the current screening batteries that can be used for diagnosis, therapy and to longitudinally track their progress. There are no classifications of ASD individuals into subgroups according to sensory motor deficits manifested in natural intentional motions of every day life tasks. This project will provide a set of non-intrusive data-capture techniques and a theoretical framework to define, simulate and empirically quantify key aspects of the social interaction problem. The research will use a geometric characterization of sensory-motor integration to investigate the roles of reference frames in steering the system to the most adequate source of sensory input in a given situation. The basic idea underlying the formal theoretical formulation is that the ASD system is impaired at forming sensory maps so it cannot intentionally switch perspectives between internally- and externally- based sources of sensory input; it cannot align sensory maps with information regarding disparate sensory processing times and generally it cannot integrate sensory processing delays from different internal-external modalities with additional sensory motor feedback delays. As a consequence the ASD system cannot have proper body awareness; lacks the ability to cast the same scenario from different perspectives; lacks the ability to decouple the physical reality from the mental representation of it, the ability to abstract; and can mostly react but not predict or anticipate its own actions, let alone the actions or the intentions of others. The theory generates a number of concrete testable predictions that will be addressed in a collaborative effort between Psychology and Computer Science at Rutgers University. A set of psychophysical experiments evaluating the different hypotheses will be carried on in children with ASD and in normally developing peers from the University's Douglass Developmental Disability Center. The research will assess several objective indexes of performance during intentional acts embedded in every day life activities and will manipulate the sources of sensory guidance to assess potential improvements in performance each day. Since such geometric indexes are independent of the movement dynamics, and of the degree of novelty or automaticity at performing the task, it is possible to address natural, unconstrained voluntary behavior and objectively quantify how the various hypothesized critical ingredients for normal social interaction break down in ASD. Even if the novel hypotheses fail, the research will be instrumental in (1) developing and standardizing non-invasive recording techniques for other Developmental Disabilities researchers to use; (2) assessing a number of currently unexplored questions and (3) providing new experimental paradigms to systematically study these problems in the ASD population.This research project will contribute to significantly advance our understanding of general brain mechanisms to control behavior, to interact with and to communicate in social environments. The project will cross over multiple fields including Clinical and Developmental Psychology, Special Education, Occupational Therapy, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics to tackle a problem of epidemic proportions according to the CDC. The measurements taken in this study will be properly scaled to young infants in order to create an objective diagnosis tool that will help society start intensive behavioral treatment before three years of age. This is important because of the high incidence and prevalence of ASD and the lack of objective screening measures for early detection and intervention. Furthermore, this project will cluster ASD children according to the areas of sensory motor deficits, superior perceptual capabilities and learning capacity within different school-age groups. This will provide a more complete picture of the phenomena with new insights into its longitudinal evolution in the developing human brain.