Temporal dyadic processes in autism risk and treatment

项目总结/摘要 自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）是目前最具遗传性，异质性和普遍性的疾病之一 儿童精神病理学，其特征是社会沟通困难，以及限制， 重复的行为。然而，许多这些沟通和行为上的困难可能不会完全表现出来， 直到后来的发展。我的长期目标是通过识别 在头两年内的早期社会困难，以更好地告知持续干预中的行为目标 努力（例如，共同关注（Joint Attention）。大量的研究强调，早期社会的困难， 交流告知语言，认知和更先进的社会发展困难， 沟通交流。然而，我们目前用来评估平均水平社会的行为方法， 困难（例如，平均声乐交流）在幼儿往往受到不一致的调查结果，样本 限制，以及儿童/家庭之间的巨大异质性。这种测量限制不可避免地 使我们对哪些社会行为是（1）后期ASD诊断的指示，以及（2）的解释变得复杂。 哪些行为应该是干预工作的重点。直到最近，可用的方法， 精确地描述二元交互作用是有限的-并且广泛地认识到二元交互作用 没有被平均水平统计完全捕获（例如，眼神交流的频率）。因此，总体目标 所提出的研究的一个目的是应用两种不同的基于时间的二元方法（即，国家空间网格; 时变效应建模）到现有二元数据，以便顺序地捕获展开的时间 高风险样本中亲子互动的模式。本研究的中心目标是 通过提供早期社会事件基于序列的表示来改进当前的测量建议 游戏中的交流，包括发展监测（目标1）和父母介导的干预（目标2） contexts.拟议的研究是创新的，在其应用的两个时间为基础的二元方法， 从未应用于高风险样本。从本质上讲，ASD是一种社会障碍， 了解这些社会困难如何在生命的头两年展开， 显著影响我们目前的实地建议，以优化儿童的社会发展， 持续的识别和干预背景。

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is currently one of the most heritable, heterogeneous, and prevalent childhood psychopathologies and is characterized by social communicative difficulties, as well as restricted, repetitive behaviors. However, many of these communicative and behavioral difficulties may not fully manifest until later in development. My long-term goal is to improve children’s developmental trajectories by identifying early social difficulties within the first two years to better inform behavioral targets within ongoing intervention efforts (e.g., responsiveness; joint attention). Copious research highlights that difficulties in early social exchanges inform later developmental difficulties in language, cognition, and more advanced social communication exchanges. However, the behavioral methods we currently use to assess mean-level social difficulties (e.g., average vocal exchanges) in young children are often limited by inconsistent findings, sample constraints, and large heterogeneity across children/families. This measurement limitation inevitably complicates our interpretations of which social behaviors are (1) indicative of later ASD diagnosis, and (2) which behaviors should be the focus of intervention efforts. Until recently, available methods to accurately and precisely describe dyadic interactions have been limited- and it is widely recognized that dyadic interactions are not fully captured by mean-level statistics (e.g., total frequency of eye contact). Thus, the overall objective of the proposed study is to apply two distinct temporal-based dyadic methodologies (i.e., state space grids; time varying effect modeling) to existing dyadic data in order to sequentially capture the unfolding temporal pattern present within parent-child interactions in elevated-risk samples. The central goal of this study is to improve current measurement recommendations by providing sequential-based representations of early social exchanges during play, in both developmental monitoring (Aim 1) and parent-mediated intervention (Aim 2) contexts. The proposed study is innovative in its application of two temporal-based dyadic methodologies that have never been applied in elevated-risk samples. At its core, ASD is a social disorder and improving our understanding of how these social difficulties unfold over the first two years of life has the potential to significantly impact our current field recommendations for optimizing children’s social development within ongoing identification and intervention contexts.