I wanted to bring attention to three videos on youtube talking about autism research!

Video game researcher, Daphne Bavelier, from the University of Geneva, recently recorded a talk on TED about her research on how playing video games can change cognitive abilities and brain development (for the better!).

Second, there is a somewhat longer video (about an hour and a half), which is the closing address from the 2012 Autism Conference at Penn State. Roy Richard Grinker, an anthropologist, from George Washington University’s talk is titled “Three perspectives on the autism epidemic”. In the talk, he covers the history of the diagnosis of autism (his talk starts about 10 minutes into the video). He has a really interesting and unique perspective as an anthropologist. Additional talks from the 2012 conference can be found here.

In addition, you can also watch the video about our autism research, as part of our crowdfunding campaign for funding the Laboratory of Developmental Neuroscience at Penn State!

For my (Elisabeth Whyte) master’s project in 2009, as part of Dr. Keith Nelson’s lab at Penn State, I worked with a local community-based social skills program for kids with autism. In the intervention program, we taught 11 children idiom phrases such as “it’s raining cats and dogs” or “raise the roof”. We used interactive worksheets and stories containing the idiom to highlight the meaning (“Raining cats and dogs” means that it is raining really hard outside. “Raise the roof” means that you are cheering loudly). In the study, we found that children were able to remember the idiom phrases that they were taught when we tested them an average of two weeks after the end of the intervention.

Here is an example of the worksheet we used in my master’s thesis for teaching idioms to kids with autism. Prior to being given the worksheets, the idiom’s meaning was discussed during the social group’s circle time (an adult read a paragraph containing the idiom and asked questions relevant to figuring out the idiom’s meaning). Thus, the meaning of the idiom was provided for them (which they had to copy onto their sheets), and then the kids were encouraged to be creative in coming up with their own examples for how to use the idioms during the worksheet activity. Some of the kids came up with really creative examples for their idioms!

The abstract from my master’s thesis is as follows:

• “Typically developing children learn idioms and other figurative language during childhood and adolescence. However, most children with autism fall behind in their idiom comprehension, and never fully reach adult levels. The current study measured the effectiveness of an idiom intervention for 11 children, age 7 to 12, with autism spectrum disorders. The results of the intervention showed large gains for the idioms included in teaching activities during the two week intervention program. In addition, relationships were found between children’s performance on idiom comprehension tasks and their current theory of mind abilities and vocabulary levels. Autistic children’s comprehension of idioms is likely related to their ability to understand the intentions and feelings of others, as measured by theory of mind tasks. Future interventions to facilitate figurative language skills in children with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome could build on this initial intervention study by increasing the scope of the intervention.”

Dr. Suzy Scherf and collaborators published an article in 2010 called “Location, location, location: alterations in the functional topography of face- but not object- or place-related cortex in adolescents with autism” in the Journal called Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

In this article, Scherf, Luna, Minshew, and Behrmann (2010) found that adolescents with autism have an atypical pattern of brain activation when viewing pictures of faces, compared to adolescents with typical development.  In addition, while the group of adolescents with typical development showed a lot of consistency in the location of activation related to viewing pictures of faces, the group of adolescents with autism showed much more variability. These findings suggest that adolescence is a particularly vulnerable period of development, particularly for face processing, in autism.

See the article’s full abstract below:

“In autism, impairments in face processing are a relatively recent discovery, but have quickly become a widely accepted aspect of the behavioral profile. Only a handful of studies have investigated potential atypicalities in autism in the development of the neural substrates mediating face processing. High-functioning individuals with autism (HFA) and matched typically developing (TD) controls watched dynamic movie vignettes of faces, common objects, buildings, and scenes of navigation while undergoing an fMRI scan. With these data, we mapped the functional topography of category-selective activation for faces bilaterally in the fusiform gyrus, occipital face area, and posterior superior temporal sulcus. Additionally, we mapped category-selective activation for objects in the lateral occipital area and for places in the parahippocampal place area in the two groups. Our findings do not indicate a generalized disruption in the development of the entire ventral visual pathway in autism. Instead, our results suggest that the functional topography of face-related cortex is selectively disrupted in autism and that this alteration is present in early adolescence. Furthermore, for those HFA adolescents who do exhibit face-selective activation, this activation tends to be located in traditionally object-related regions, which supports the hypothesis that perceptual processing of faces in autism may be more akin to the perceptual processing of common objects in TD individuals.”