The goal of this Mentored Research Scientist Development Award (K01) is to promote an independentresearch career by bridging the candidate's training in infant development and pediatric neuroimaging withinnovations in biomedical imaging, advances in statistical methods for longitudinal data analysis, and cutting-edge clinical science. The candidate's short-term goal is to identify changes in the brain that accompanytransitions in social behavior in typical infancy and disruptions thereof in ASD. This work is motivated by arecent finding that preferential attention to the eyes of others—a basic mechanism of social adaptive action intypical infants—was not immediately diminished in infants later diagnosed with ASD. Instead, infants laterdiagnosed with ASD exhibited a slight but significant increase in eye-looking at 2 months, which then declined;in contrast, typical infants exhibited a relative low point in eye-looking at 2 months, which then increased. Thetiming of this difference coincides with a developmental transition, around month 2, in which typical infants arethought to move from experience-expectant mechanisms of social adaptive action (that is: subcortically-mediated, `reflex-like' behaviors) to experience-dependent ones (i.e., cortically-mediated voluntary actions thatbuild iteratively on new experiences). This theoretical account suggests a specific hypothesis in ASD: reflex-like adaptive action may initially be present, while the emergence of experience-dependent voluntary socialadaptive action subsequently fails. This study will test this hypothesis by measuring, from birth to 6 months ininfants at low and high-risk for ASD,: 1) the decline of reflex-like predispositions and the emergence ofvoluntary behaviors (eye-looking and social smiling, measured by eye-tracking and parent-infant interaction);and 2) developmental change in subcortical and cortical networks (measured by fMRI and DTI) and theirrelationship to unfolding behavior. To achieve these aims, the candidate will receive training in 5 areas: 1)phenotypic assessment of infants at low and high-risk for ASD; 2) advances in eye-tracking technology thatoptimize data acquisition in neonates; 3) innovations in biomedical imaging for improving acquisition and pre-processing of infant neuroimaging data; 4) analysis of infant resting-state fMRI and DTI data; and 5)breakthroughs in statistical methods for the analysis of infant longitudinal data. The training plan is supportedby a multidisciplinary team of mentors—including Drs. Ami Klin, Warren Jones, John Pruett, Gordon Ramsay,and Xiaoping Hu—and the strengths of two centers within Emory: the Marcus Autism Center, one of only threeNIH Autism Centers of Excellence, providing groundbreaking research and clinical care for individuals withASD, and the Biomedical Imaging Technology Center, a center for cutting-edge biomedical imaging research.The intersection of these strengths provides an ideal training environment for promoting the candidate's long-term goal of understanding the pathogenesis of ASD and informing intervention.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
