Neural mechanisms of naturalistic viewing in children with autism or ADHD

• Applicant: Dr. Stefanie Schelinski
• Subject Area: Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2019 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 429525912

The fast and accurate processing of complex, dynamic auditory and visual information is a key requirement for successful social communication. Investigating brain responses to real-life conditions is a challenging task in neuroscience and many studies lack ecological validity. The use of naturalistic viewing paradigms, where participants freely watch a movie while brain responses are recorded is one possibility to investigate neural responses to real-life conditions with high ecological validity. Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies showed that the neural responses to such naturalistic audio-visual stimuli and its time courses are (i) highly similar across typically developing adults (i.e. high inter-individual correlation) but (ii) highly variable (i.e. low inter-individual correlation) across adults with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ASD is a developmental disorder with onset in early childhood which is associated with impaired social interaction and communication. However, the generalisability of previous results to childhood, the relation to ASD symptom severity and the specificity to ASD are unclear. Here, we aim to address the following three novel research questions: (i) What are the neural responses to naturalistic viewing in a large cohort of children with ASD? (ii) How are the neural responses to naturalistic viewing related to symptom severity in ASD? (iii) How specific are the neural responses to naturalistic viewing for ASD? We aim to address these open research questions by analysing fMRI data on naturalistic viewing from large cohorts of children with and without ASD from an ongoing multi-center project. During the fMRI experiment, all children watch the same movies, which contain rich audio-visual and social information. We plan to identify the time courses of brain responses during this naturalistic viewing using a standard approach, i.e., inter-subject correlation analysis. We aim to analyse fMRI data from at least 200 children with ASD and 200 typically developing children (matched on age, sex and cognitive abilities). We will analyse ASD subtypes to relate these neural responses to symptom severity using standard diagnostic scores. To investigate the specificity for ASD, we will additionally analyse and compare the neural response profiles from at least 200 matched children with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), another neurodevelopmental condition with an assumed partly common aetiology with ASD. Comparing children with ASD and ADHD will further inform about distinct and common features of the two clinical conditions and will thus have clinical relevance. Further, with our results, we will inform about basic mechanisms of social processing in atypical as well in as in typical development with high ecological validity. The investigation of large cohorts will provide results of high statistical reliability and thus meet a currently growing demand in neuroscience.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Ph.D.