BEHAVIORAL PILOT FOR AN IMAGING STUDY OF SOCIAL ATTENTION DEFICITS IN AUTISM

自闭症社会注意力缺陷影像学研究的行为试点

• 批准号: 7384590
• 负责人: John R Pruett
• 金额: $ 17.1万
• 依托单位: WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-01-10 至 2009-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7384590
• 关键词: 12 year old; Address; Adult; Affect; Age; Applications Grants; Area; Attention; Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; Autistic Disorder; Base of the Brain; Behavior Control; Behavioral; Boxing; Child; Childhood; Class; Clinical; Condition; Conflict (Psychology); Cues; Data; Development; Diagnosis; Diagnostic; Disruption; Early identification; Ensure; Experimental Designs; Eye; Eye Movements; Face; Face Processing; Failure; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Future; Genetic Screening; Goals; Heritability; Image; Impairment; Individual; Left; Literature; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Mechanics; Medical; Mental Retardation; Mental disorders; Mentally Disabled Persons; Methods; Monitor; Nature; Neuroanatomy; Numbers; Oral cavity; Outcome; Population; Population Study; Positioning Attribute; Principal Investigator; Probability; Process; Public Health; Publishing; Purpose; Reaction Time; Research; Resources; Risk; Saccades; Screening procedure; Siblings; Staging; Stimulus; Testing; Thinking; Variant; Visual attention; age group; autistic children; base; design; fusiform face area; gaze; genetic epidemiology; improved; neuroimaging; neuromechanism; preference; psychologic; relating to nervous system; research study; response; sample fixation; social; visual process; visual processing; visual search; visual stimulus

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project represents a first step toward our long-term goal of understanding the psychological and brain bases of social attention deficits in autism. Findings would inform many areas of autism research, including: phenomenology, genetic epidemiology, screening and diagnostics, and treatment response. Disrupted attention to eye gaze and abnormal visual processing of faces are two attractive candidate hypotheses about core autistic deficits. The experimental literature on these topics, however, describes conflicting findings. This study will test hypotheses about disrupted attention to eye gaze in autism by adapting a classical visual attention task (comparing gaze cues to simple box and arrow cues). Discrepant findings in the field are likely due to the complexities of controlling key variables in such tasks in an extremely challenging study population. Specific Aim 1: The design in this proposal addresses these issues in an incisive way, controlling for confounding effects of eye movement and adding within-subject control conditions to the spatial attention task, necessary to disambiguate results seen with prior studies using gaze cues. Specific Aim 2: A converging task, using variants of classical visual search methods, will explore the potential failure of the eye region of the face to capture attention in autistic individuals. These experiments will involve 60 children, ages 9-12: 30 each from two contrasting groups: high functioning autistic disorder (mental retardation excluded) and typically developing (no diagnosis). The between-group design tests for social but not basic attention deficits in autism and normal attention in the typical children. These pilot behavioral experiments will set the stage for a future neuroimaging proposal (functional magnetic resonance imaging: fMRI). Should the efforts proposed here be successful, future proposals for behavioral and imaging studies would include developmental contrasts (children of different ages and adults), clinical contrasts (e.g., attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder sub types), and genetically informed designs (e.g., sibling designs for autistic spectrum individuals; and affected and unaffected siblings within population-defined, heritable ADHD subtypes) to explore the heritability of psychological and neural factors associated with autism (and ADHD). PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This study of the psychological and brain bases of autism is relevant to public health because it will help characterize aspects of the most serious psychiatric disorder of childhood in ways that will make autism more amenable to genetic, screening, and interventional studies. As such it will improve early identification, which is crucial for improving outcome in affected individuals.

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目代表了我们朝着了解自闭症社会注意力缺陷的心理和大脑基础这一长期目标迈出的第一步。研究结果将为自闭症研究的许多领域提供信息，包括：现象学、遗传流行病学、筛查和诊断以及治疗反应。对眼睛注视的注意力中断和面部视觉处理异常是关于自闭症核心缺陷的两个有吸引力的候选假设。然而，关于这些主题的实验文献描述了相互矛盾的发现。这项研究将通过采用经典的视觉注意任务（将注视线索与简单的方框和箭头线索进行比较）来测试有关自闭症患者眼睛注视注意力中断的假设。该领域的不一致研究结果可能是由于在极具挑战性的研究人群中控制此类任务中的关键变量的复杂性所致。具体目标 1：本提案中的设计以深刻的方式解决了这些问题，控制了眼球运动的混杂效应，并向空间注意任务添加了受试者内控制条件，这对于消除使用凝视线索的先前研究中看到的结果是必要的。具体目标 2：一项融合任务，使用经典视觉搜索方法的变体，将探索自闭症患者面部的眼睛区域无法吸引注意力的潜在失败。这些实验将涉及 60 名儿童，年龄 9-12 岁：每组 30 名，来自两个对比组：高功能自闭症障碍（排除智力迟钝）和典型发育障碍（未诊断）。组间设计测试了自闭症患者的社交注意力缺陷，但不是基本注意力缺陷以及典型儿童的正常注意力缺陷。这些试点行为实验将为未来的神经影像提案（功能磁共振成像：fMRI）奠定基础。如果这里提出的努力成功，未来的行为和影像研究建议将包括发育对比（不同年龄的儿童和成人）、临床对比（例如，注意力缺陷/多动症亚型）和遗传设计（例如，针对自闭症谱系个体的兄弟姐妹设计；以及人群定义的遗传性多动症亚型中受影响和未受影响的兄弟姐妹），以探索与自闭症相关的心理和神经因素的遗传性（以及多动症）。公共健康相关性：这项关于自闭症心理和大脑基础的研究与公共健康相关，因为它将有助于描述儿童时期最严重的精神疾病的各个方面，从而使自闭症更适合遗传、筛查和干预研究。因此，它将改善早期识别，这对于改善受影响个体的结果至关重要。