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。自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）估计影响世界各地每166名儿童中约有1名，其患病率使其成为最常见的发育障碍。据保守估计，在美国有超过40万人患有某种形式的ASD。这些症状在生命早期开始出现，并导致终身残疾，目前无法治愈。然而，早期干预会有显著的改善，并且在非常早期的强化行为治疗后恢复正常有一定程度的成功。所有ASD儿童的共同点是社交反应和沟通方面的缺陷。值得注意的是，这些孩子中没有一个能在他们的世界中正常互动和发挥作用。他们不能参与想象力，假装游戏，不能发起和维持与其他儿童的对话。其原因尚不清楚，但越来越多的证据表明，受环境影响的异常大脑发育在很大程度上是造成这些症状的原因。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。在目前的筛查组合中，没有可用于诊断、治疗和纵向跟踪其进展的客观性能指标。目前还没有根据日常生活任务的自然有意运动中表现出的感觉运动缺陷将ASD个体分类为亚组。该项目将提供一套非侵入性的数据捕获技术和理论框架来定义，模拟和实证量化社会互动问题的关键方面。该研究将使用感觉-运动整合的几何表征来研究参考系在特定情况下将系统引导到最适当的感觉输入源中的作用。正式的理论公式的基本思想是，ASD系统在形成感觉地图时受损，因此它不能有意地在基于内部和外部的感觉输入源之间切换视角;它不能将感觉地图与关于不同感觉处理时间的信息对齐，并且通常它不能将来自不同内部-外部模态的感觉处理延迟与额外的感觉运动反馈延迟整合。因此，自闭症谱系障碍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;缺乏将物理现实与其心理表征分离的能力，抽象的能力;并且大多数情况下可以做出反应，但不能预测或预期自己的行动，更不用说其他人的行动或意图了。该理论产生了一些具体的可测试的预测，这些预测将在罗格斯大学心理学和计算机科学之间的合作中得到解决。一组心理物理实验评估不同的假设将进行在自闭症儿童和正常发展的同龄人从大学的道格拉斯发展障碍中心。该研究将评估嵌入日常生活活动中的有意行为期间的几个客观表现指数，并将操纵感官指导的来源，以评估每天表现的潜在改善。由于这样的几何指数是独立的运动动力学，以及在执行任务的新奇性或自动性的程度，它是可能的，以解决自然的，不受约束的自愿行为，并客观地量化如何正常的社会互动的各种假设的关键成分打破了ASD。即使新的假设失败，这项研究将有助于（1）发展和标准化非侵入性记录技术，供其他发育障碍研究人员使用;（2）评估一些目前尚未探讨的问题;（3）为系统地研究ASD人群中的这些问题提供了新的实验范式。该研究项目将有助于显着推进我们对一般大脑的理解控制行为的机制，与社会环境互动和交流的机制。该项目将跨越多个领域，包括临床和发展心理学，特殊教育，职业治疗，计算机科学和应用数学，以解决疾病预防控制中心的流行病问题。这项研究中所进行的测量将适当地扩展到幼儿，以创建一个客观的诊断工具，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ASD的发病率和患病率很高，而且缺乏早期发现和干预的客观筛查措施。此外，该项目将根据不同学龄组中的感觉运动缺陷、上级感知能力和学习能力对自闭症儿童进行分组。这将提供一个更完整的图片的现象与新的见解，其纵向演变的发展中的人类大脑。

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.