Components of Limited Activity Monitoring in Toddlers with ASD

描述（由申请人提供）：患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的儿童在多个领域表现出缺陷，包括联合注意力、模仿和仿真。在典型的发展过程中，这些关键的社交技能取决于监控他人的活动和行动。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）幼儿参加的活动更少，而是更多地关注非社会背景元素，如玩具。当儿童被剥夺了向他人学习的重要途径时，可能会出现级联缺陷，因此迫切需要更好地了解导致典型和非典型活动监测的发展机制。本研究旨在通过研究可能影响20个月大的ASD幼儿和14、20个月大的TD幼儿这种能力的社会、知觉和发展因素，来理解为什么ASD幼儿监测他人活动的频率较低。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，从而为理解ASD中有限的活动监测提供一个背景。关于ASD，本提案试图量化ASD中有限的活动监测在多大程度上是由于(1)较少关注他人共同注意的位点；(2)对动作线索的敏感度较低；(3)更容易被知觉干扰物从社会活动中分散注意力。为了回答这些问题，我们向受试者展示了描绘两个演员之间戏剧互动的场景，并调整了以下因素：(1)演员是专注于中心共享区域还是相互依赖；(2)场景是以静态图像还是动态电影的形式呈现；(3)背景中玩具等干扰物的杂乱程度。为了阐明这些因素的影响，我们还研究了实验条件下的注意模式与ASD的社会认知功能之间的关系。最后，我们将传统的方差分析方法与计算建模和动态分析相结合，以便更好地了解ASD和TD幼儿活动监测的微观结构。在TD儿童快速发展和技能习得的年龄，活动监测的中断可能严重影响ASD儿童的社会经验。通过了解导致ASD中活动监测受限的因素，并通过绘制典型发育中活动监测变化的图表，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方法，有助于开发分析ASD异质性的新工具，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.