Intersensory Perception of Social Events: Typical and Atypical Development

本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。我已经制定了一个计划，将我对注意力和感官间知觉典型发展的知识、培训和基础研究与自闭症非典型注意力和感官间知觉的新知识、培训和研究相结合，以一种将导致显著交叉的方式，为每个程序增加价值。这种协同效应将通过追求职业发展活动来实现，如定向阅读，前往会议和研究实验室，创建一个合作研究网络，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相互通报。这些研究方向集中在如何以及在什么条件下社会事件的各个方面（认知，知觉，情感和沟通发展的主要基础）变得突出，出席和感知，以及如何在发展过程中发生变化。该计划弥合了对婴儿和儿童，单峰和多模态感知，社会和非社会事件感知以及典型和非典型发展进行的研究之间的差距。 第一个研究方向（我目前资助的RO 1）评估了婴儿和幼儿对社会事件的感觉间感知的典型发展，重点是感觉间冗余在指导和组织注意力和感知发展中的作用。它结合了婴儿控制的习惯化、反应时间、视觉偏好和眼动追踪措施。第二个研究方向（由Autism Speaks资助）评估自闭症儿童，典型发育和发育迟缓儿童对社会和非社会事件的注意力和感官间感知。我们开发了一种新的协议，在一次测试中评估注意力的四个基本组成部分（脱离、定向、维持、感觉间处理），以清楚地描述自闭症的注意力技能和障碍。自闭症儿童表现出社会定向障碍，对面孔、人和语言的注意力减少。然而，我们对社会事件的注意和知觉的典型性质、基础和发展过程却知之甚少。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基础上的典型发展的注意面孔，声音和视听讲话，在婴儿期和幼儿期。这些研究将弥合典型和非典型发育知识之间的关键差距，并通过使用常见的方法，措施和刺激，在2至36个月的年龄范围内，在我目前的两个研究项目之间建立直接联系。这将提供一个全面的典型发展的发展图片，作为发展科学的理论基础，并提供一个发展的背景和基线，以评估整个婴儿期和幼儿期的非典型发展。 如果KO2的提案得到资助，这将使我有时间去追求新提出的研究方向和职业发展活动，旨在整合我正在进行的典型发展与非典型发展的研究计划。在接下来的几年里，我唯一准备完成这一目标的独特和幸运的情况下，有一个资助的RO1典型的发展沿着一小笔赠款自闭症，并训练有素的研究团队到位，为每个程序，以及获得一个高技能和有才华的合作者群体。KO2奖提供的额外时间将使我们能够通过研究，培训，奖学金，合作和指导将这种整合提升到一个新的水平。

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.