Components of Limited Activity Monitoring in Toddlers with ASD

描述（由申请人提供）：自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童在多个领域表现出缺陷，包括联合注意力，模仿和模仿。在典型的发展中，这些关键的社交技能取决于监视他人的活动和行动。我们最近的研究表明，20个月大的ASD幼儿比年龄匹配的典型发育（TD）幼儿和年龄和认知匹配的发育迟缓（DD）幼儿更少参加活动，而是更多地关注非社会背景元素，如玩具。鉴于级联赤字时，可能会出现儿童被剥夺了一个重要的途径，从别人那里学习，存在着迫切需要更好地了解发展机制，导致典型和非典型的活动监测。 这项建议旨在了解为什么自闭症幼儿监测他人的活动不太频繁，通过检查社会，知觉和发展因素，可能会影响这种能力在20个月大的自闭症幼儿和14个月和20个月大的TD幼儿。关于典型的发展，本提案旨在绘制活动监测的规范性发展变化，并了解这些变化的基础，从而提供一个了解ASD中有限活动监测的背景。关于ASD，该提议试图量化ASD中有限的活动监测在多大程度上是由于（1）较少地朝向他人的共同注意力所在地;（2）对运动线索不太敏感;以及（3）更容易被感知干扰物从社交活动中分心。为了回答这些问题，我们向受试者呈现描绘两个演员之间的游戏互动的场景，并调整以下因素：（1）演员是否专注于中央共享区域或相互关注;（2）场景是否显示为静态图像或动态电影;以及（3）背景与玩具等干扰物的混乱程度。为了澄清这些因素的影响，我们还研究了实验条件下的注意力模式和ASD的社会认知功能之间的关系。最后，为了更好地理解ASD和TD幼儿活动监测的微观结构，我们增加了传统的方差分析方法与计算建模和动态分析。 在TD儿童发生快速发展和技能获得的年龄，活动监测中断可能会严重影响ASD儿童的社会经验。通过了解导致ASD活动监测受限的因素，并通过绘制典型发育中活动监测的变化，我们希望能够深入了解ASD中可能发生改变的特定过程。因此，这项工作有可能导致新的结果测量，以帮助开发新的工具来解析ASD的异质性，并为ASD早期发展的靶向治疗设计提供信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit deficits in multiple domains including joint attention, imitation, and emulation. In typical development, these key social skills hinge on monitoring the activities and actions of others. Our recent study demonstrated that 20-month old toddlers with ASD attend less to activities than both age-matched typically developing (TD) toddlers and age- and cognitively-matched developmentally delayed (DD) toddlers, focusing instead more on non-social background elements such as toys. Given the cascading deficits that may arise when children are deprived of a vital route by which to learn from others, there exists a pressing need to better understand the developmental mechanisms leading to both typical and atypical activity monitoring. This proposal seeks to understand why toddlers with ASD monitor the activities of others less frequently by examining the social, perceptual, and developmental factors which may influence this ability in 20-month old toddlers with ASD and 14- and 20-month old TD toddlers. In regards to typical development, this proposal aims to chart the normative developmental changes in activity monitoring and to understand the bases for these changes, thus providing a context by which to understand limited activity monitoring in ASD. In regards to ASD, this proposal seeks to quantify to what extent limited activity monitoring in ASD is due to (1) orienting less towards the locus of the shared attention of others; (2) being less sensitive to motion cues; and (3) being more easily distracted from social activities by perceptual distractors. To answer these questions we present subjects with scenes depicting play interactions between two actors and modulate the following factors: (1) whether the actors are focused on the centrally shared area or mutually upon each other; (2) whether the scene is shown as a static image or a dynamic movie; and (3) the extent to which the background is cluttered with distractors such as toys. To clarify the impact of these factors, we also examine the relationships between patterns of attention in experimental conditions and socio-cognitive functioning in ASD. Finally, we augment traditional analysis of variance analytic approach with computational modeling and dynamic analyses in order to better understand the microstructure of activity monitoring in ASD and TD toddlers. Disruptions in activity monitoring at an age where rapid development and skill acquisition is occurring in TD children may critically impact the social experience of children with ASD. By understanding the factors contributing to limited activity monitoring in ASD, and by charting the changes in activity monitoring occurring in typical development, we hope to gain insight into those specific processes which may be altered in ASD. This work thus has the potential to lead to novel measures of outcome, to aid in the development of new tools for parsing the heterogeneity of ASD, and to inform the design of targeted treatment for ASD in early development.