Intersensory Perception of Social Events: Typical and Atypical Development

描述(由申请人提供)：这项KO2提案的目的是为我提供时间和资源，用于职业发展和研究活动的结合，旨在增强我在早期感知和关注领域推进发展科学的能力。我的首要目标是使婴儿和儿童发展的基础研究更容易转化为应用，如自闭症等障碍的非典型发育，以及家庭或学校等自然学习环境。我已经制定了一个计划，将我关于注意力和感觉间知觉典型发展的知识、培训和基础研究与自闭症中关于非典型注意和感觉间知觉的新知识、培训和研究交织在一起，从而为每个项目带来显著的交叉受精和增值。这种协同效应将通过开展职业发展活动来实现，例如定向阅读、前往会议和研究实验室、创建合作研究网络、学习先进的统计方法、撰写理论和概念论文、培训和指导下一代科学家，以及通过直接交织三个先验设计的研究方向来相互提供信息。这些研究方向集中在社会事件的各个方面(认知、知觉、情感和交际发展的主要基础)如何以及在什么条件下变得突出、被关注和被感知，以及这种变化如何在发展过程中发生变化。拟议的计划弥合了对婴儿和儿童、单峰和多峰知觉、社会和非社会事件知觉以及典型和非典型发展之间的研究差距。第一个研究方向(我目前资助的RO1)评估了婴幼儿对社会事件的感觉间知觉的典型发展，重点是感觉间冗余在引导和组织注意力和知觉发展中的作用。它使用了婴儿控制的习惯化、反应时间、视觉偏好和眼球跟踪测量的组合。第二个研究方向(由自闭症发言人资助)评估了患有自闭症、典型发育和发育迟缓的儿童对社会和非社会事件的注意力和感官间知觉。我们开发了一种新的方案，在一次测试中评估四个基本的注意力构建块(脱离、定向、维持、感觉间处理)，以明确描述自闭症的注意力技能和障碍。自闭症儿童表现出社交定向障碍，对面孔、人和语言的注意力减少。然而，我们对关注和感知社会事件的典型性质、基础和发展过程知之甚少。因此，在第三个(新的)研究方向，我建议提供第一个系统的数据库，关于婴儿和早期儿童对面孔、声音和视听语言的注意力的典型发展。这些研究将弥合典型和非典型发育知识之间的关键差距，并通过使用从2个月到36个月的年龄段的共同方法、测量和刺激，在我目前的两个研究项目之间建立直接联系。这将提供典型发展的全面发展图景，作为发展科学理论的基础，并为评估婴幼儿和早期儿童的非典型发展提供发展背景和基线。如果KO2计划得到资助，这将使我有时间继续新提出的研究方向和职业发展活动，旨在将我正在进行的典型发展研究计划与非典型发展研究计划相结合。在接下来的几年里，鉴于独特而幸运的情况，我将唯一地做好准备来实现这一目标，因为我拥有典型开发的RO1资金，以及针对自闭症的小额拨款，每个项目都有训练有素的研究团队，以及能够接触到高技能和有才华的合作者团队。KO2奖提供的额外时间将使我们有可能通过研究、培训、奖学金、合作和指导将这种融合提高到一个新的水平。 公共卫生相关性：这项研究将揭示有关关注婴儿和儿童的社会和非社会事件的性质、基础和发展的新信息。研究结果将提供大量关于自闭症幼儿非典型注意力的关键信息，以及2至36个月大婴儿注意力的典型发展，其详细程度是新颖的，对于早期识别非典型发育模式是必要的，包括自闭症的社会注意力缺陷。研究结果可以很容易地转化为现实世界的环境，并可以作为干预发育迟缓的基础。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of this KO2 proposal is to provide me with time and resources for a combination of career development and research activities designed to enhance my ability to advance developmental science in the area of early perception and attention. My overarching aim is to make basic research in infant and child development more easily translated to applications such as atypical development in disorders such as autism and to natural learning contexts such as home or school. I have created a plan for interweaving my knowledge, training, and basic research on the typical development of attention and intersensory perception with new knowledge, training, and research on atypical attention and intersensory perception in autism, in a way that will result in significant cross-fertilization and value added for each program. This synergistic effect will be accomplished by pursuing career development activities such as directed readings, traveling to conferences and research labs, creating a collaborative research network, learning advanced statistical methods, writing theory and concept papers, and training and mentoring the next generation of scientists, as well as by directly interweaving three research directions designed a priori to inform one another. These research directions converge to focus on how and under what conditions various aspects of social events (a primary basis for cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and communicative development) become salient, attended, and perceived and how this changes across development. The proposed program bridges gaps between research conducted on infants and children, unimodal and multimodal perception, social and nonsocial event perception, and typical and atypical development. The first research direction (my currently funded RO1) assesses the typical development of intersensory perception of social events in infants and young children with a focus on the role of intersensory redundancy in guiding and organizing the development of attention and perception. It uses a combination of infant controlled habituation, reaction time, visual preference, and eye tracking measures. A second research direction (funded by Autism Speaks) assesses attention and intersensory perception of social and nonsocial events in children with autism, typical development, and developmental delay. We have developed a new protocol assessing four basic building blocks of attention (disengagement, orienting, maintenance, intersensory processing) in a single test to clearly characterize attention skills and impairments in autism. Children with autism show a social orienting impairment, with reduced attention to faces, people, and speech. However, we know little about the typical nature, basis and developmental course of attention and perception of social events. In a third (new) research direction, I thus propose to provide the first systematic data base on the typical development of attention to faces, voices, and audiovisual speech, across infancy and early childhood. These studies will bridge critical gaps between knowledge of typical and atypical development and forge direct links between my two current research programs by using common methods, measures, and stimuli across age, from 2- to 36- months. This will provide a comprehensive developmental picture of typical development, serving as a basis for theory in developmental science and providing a developmental context and baseline for evaluating atypical development across infancy and early childhood. If the KO2 proposal is funded, this would allow me the time to pursue the newly proposed research direction and the career development activities designed to integrate my ongoing research program on typical development with that of atypical development. During the next few years, I am uniquely poised to accomplish this goal given the unique and fortunate circumstances of having a funded RO1 on typical development along with a small grant on autism, and trained research teams in place for each program, as well as access to a highly skilled and talented group of collaborators. The additional time afforded by the KO2 award would make it possible to take this integration to the next level through research, training, scholarship, collaboration and mentoring. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This research will reveal new information about the nature, basis and development of attention to social and nonsocial events in infants and children. Findings will provide a wealth of critical information about atypical attention in young children with autism and about the typical development of attention between 2- and 36-months of age, at a level of detail that is novel and necessary for the early identification of atypical patterns of development, including social attention deficits characteristic of autism. Findings are designed to be easily translated to real world settings and can serve as a basis for interventions for developmental delays.