Intersensory Perception of Social Events: Typical and Atypical Development

这个KO2提案的目的是为我提供时间和资源，将职业发展和研究活动结合起来，以提高我在早期感知和注意力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，如自闭症等疾病的非典型发展，以及家庭或学校等自然学习环境。我制定了一个计划，将我在典型的注意和感官知觉发展方面的知识、训练和基础研究与自闭症的非典型注意和感官知觉方面的新知识、训练和研究相结合，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追求职业发展活动来实现，如指导阅读、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，以及通过直接交织先验设计的三个研究方向来相互通知。这些研究方向汇聚在一起，关注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，以及这在发展过程中如何变化。该项目旨在弥合婴幼儿研究、单模态和多模态感知、社会和非社会事件感知、典型和非典型发展之间的差距。

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.