CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Computational Science for Improving Assessment of Executive Function in Children

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The identification of cognitive impairments in early childhood provides the best opportunity for successful remedial intervention, because brain plasticity diminishes with age. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a psychiatric neurodevelopmental disorder that is very hard to diagnose or tell apart from other disorders. Symptoms include inattention, hyperactivity, or acting impulsively, all of which often result in poor performance in school and persist later in life. In this project, an interdisciplinary team of computer and neurocognitive scientists will develop and implement transformative computational approaches to evaluate the cognitive profiles of young children and to address these issues. The project will take advantage of both physical and computer based exercises already in place in 300 schools in the United States and involving thousands of children, many of whom have been diagnosed with ADHD or other learning disabilities. Project outcomes will have important implications for a child's success in school, self-image, and future employment and community functioning. The PIs will discover new knowledge about the role of physical exercise in cognitive training, including correlations between individual metrics and degree of improvement over time. They will identify important new metrics and correlations currently unknown to cognitive scientists, which will have broad impact on other application domains as well. And the PIs will develop an interdisciplinary course on computational cognitive science and one on user interfaces for neurocognitive experts.The research will involve four thrusts. The PIs will devise new human motion analysis and computer vision algorithms that can automatically assess embodied cognition during structured physical activities, and which will constitute a breakthrough in improving the accuracy and efficiency of cognitive assessments of young children. Intelligent mining techniques will be used to discover new knowledge about the role of physical exercise in cognitive training and to find correlations between individual metrics and degree of improvement over time. A methodology will be developed using advanced multimodal sensing to collect and process huge amounts of evidence based assessment data with intelligent mechanisms that learn about a child's executive function capabilities and help uncover possible causes of cognitive dysfunctions. And a closed loop cognitive assessment system will be designed and implemented to understand and monitor a child's progress over time and provide recommendations and decision support to cognitive experts so they can make better treatment decisions.