The Development of Social, Attention, and Perception Abilities in Typical and At-risk Infants

自闭症和注意力缺陷多动障碍(ADHD)等发育障碍的诊断很少在3岁之前发生。因此，人们对这些疾病在婴儿期出现的情况知之甚少。识别这些疾病的最早症状很重要，原因有三：(1)因为它使我们能够在儿童的困难因多年的非典型发育而变得更加复杂之前，看到其原始的“纯粹”形式的症状；(2)它使我们能够发现表明婴儿的发育需要密切监测的早期风险迹象；(3)它使我们能够在全面综合征发作之前对发育过程进行潜在的干预--一些人认为，这种策略可能比等到障碍完全确立之前更有效。在第一部分(A)中，我们将扩大我们目前对将来诊断为自闭症的高危婴儿的研究，包括患有ADHD的高危婴儿(由于是已经被诊断为ADHD的大孩子的弟弟或妹妹)。我们将使用各种适合婴儿的方法，如自然睡眠中的磁共振成像(MRI)、脑电(EEG)、眼球跟踪和亲子互动，比较典型(低风险)婴儿和那些自闭症和ADHD高危婴儿的大脑和认知功能的发展。我们之所以选择比较自闭症和ADHD的风险，有几个原因。其中之一是确定早期预警信号对特定后续结果的具体程度。另一个原因是，我们知道这些疾病之间存在一些共同的遗传风险，而且它们通常在同一个孩子中共同发生。A部分嵌入国家和国际合作网络，以增加在一些关键措施上研究的婴儿数量，并相应地提高我们检测效果的能力。在A部分，我们寻找最早出现的标志物和症状，在B部分，我们将启动潜在的早期干预工作。具体地说，我们将以我们最近的研究为基础，通过让典型(低风险)婴儿参与眼球跟踪器控制的游戏来提高他们的注意力技能，在游戏中，他们跟踪屏幕上移动的物体。我们将通过几种方式扩展这项工作，使培训计划更适合作为对有ADHD风险的婴儿的潜在干预，例如通过大幅延长培训期限，以及通过利用新技术允许在婴儿家中进行一些培训课程。在C部分，我们计划了一系列新的基础研究，将来也可以扩展到有ADHD风险的婴儿。虽然我们对视觉和听觉处理的早期发展了解很多，但对触觉的研究却很少。触摸对学习很重要，原因有很多，包括它是与父母进行感官互动的主要模式。我们将使用几种成像方法来了解大脑区域的发展，这些区域对于基本的触摸、社交触摸以及婴儿对自己身体的多感官感知非常重要。

Diagnosis of developmental disorders such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) rarely occurs prior to 3 years. Thus, there is very little known about the emergence of these disorders during infancy. It is important to identify the earliest symptoms of these conditions for three reasons: (1) as it allows us to see symptoms in their original "pure" form before a child's difficulties becomes compounded by years of atypical development, (2) it enables us to discover early risk signs suggesting the infant's development needs close monitoring, and (3) it allows us to potentially intervene in the course of development before the onset of the full syndrome - a strategy that some believe may be more effective than waiting until a disorder is fully established. This grant addresses these issues in three parts.In the first Part (A) we will expand on our current studies of infants at-risk for a later diagnosis of autism to also include infants at-risk for ADHD (by virtue of being the younger brother or sister of an older child already diagnosed with ADHD). We will compare the development of brain and cognitive functions in typical (low-risk) infants, and those at-risk for autism and ADHD, using a variety of baby-friendly methods such as MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) while in natural sleep, EEG (electroencephalography), eye-tracking, and parent-infant interaction. We have chosen to compare autism and ADHD risk for several reasons. One of these is to determine how specific the early warning signs are for particular later outcomes. Another reason is that we know that there is some shared genetic risk between these disorders, and that they quite commonly co-occur in the same children. Part A is embedded within national and international collaborative networks in order to increase the number of babies studied on some key measures, and correspondingly increase our ability to detect effects.While in Part A we search for the earliest appearing markers and symptoms, in Part B we will initiate work on potential early interventions. Specifically, we will build on our recent study on improving attention skills in typical (low-risk) infants by engaging them in eye-tracker controlled "games" in which they track moving objects on a screen. We will extend this work in several ways to make the training programme more suitable as a potential intervention for infants at-risk for ADHD, e.g. by greatly extending the period of training, and by taking advantage of new technology to allow for some training sessions to take place in the infant's home.In Part C we plan a new line of basic research that can also be extended to infants at-risk in the future. While we know much about the early development of vision and auditory processing, very little research has been done on the sense of touch. Touch is important to study for many reasons, including that it is a primary mode of sensory interaction with parents. We will use several imaging methods to learn about the development of brain regions important for basic aspects of touch, social touch, and the infants emerging multi-sensory perception of its own body.