Research within the Section on Social and Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience

National Institute Of Mental Health

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

As a new Section at the National Institute of Mental Health, this past year has been focused on building the lab's infrastructure and designing and implementing our initial projects. We are currently focusing on three primary projects comprised of i). evaluating the best practices for analyzing longitudinal data; ii). evaluating a large cohort of twins from Virginia Commonwealth University's Mid-Atlantic Twin Registry with the goal to assess genetic and environmental characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and importantly, co-occurring disorders along the continuum within the population; and iii). parsing the etiologic contributions from genetics, shared and non-shared environment, and stochastic processes in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. The first project involves multiple sites to model and investigate longitudinal relationships in the interplay between brain, behavior, and cognition from childhood into young adulthood. One of the challenges of longitudinal studies is the lack of a gold standard related to the nature of the underlying relationship between brain and behavior. Thus, applying different statistical models to longitudinal data, considering that different models have different underlying assumptions, may yield either false positive or false negative results. By working together with one additional internal NIH site and six external sites, we plan to independently create large longitudinal datasets and to statistically test longitudinal models created by the different groups. The second and third projects will examine different aspects of the contribution of genetic, environmental, and stochastic mechanisms related to the development of ASD. Through collaboration with the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), we will utilize a large twin registry, the Mid-Atlantic Twin Registry (MATR) to first screen a large sample of twins from the general population for autistic and co-occurring symptoms of autism in the general population. Autistic symptoms will be measured using the Social Responsiveness Scale, which includes the subdomains of social awareness, social cognition, social communication, social motivation, restricted interests, and repetitive behaviors. We will also evaluate comorbid symptoms of anxiety, depression, hyperactivity, attention, conduct problems, and sleep. We plan to examine how these comorbid symptom domains covary with autistic symptom domains to investigate the potential role of environmental or stochastic mechanisms in the development of ASD. A series of questionnaires will be sent out to the parents of approximately 3,000 twins between the ages of 6 and 17 who are part of the MATR. Planning for this study is complete and submitted and we expect it to commence in the fall. The third study will utilize the results from the MATR project to recruit a subgroup of twins with ASD and matched controls. These twins and their parents will come into the National Institutes of Health for in-depth clinical, cognitive, and social-cognitive assessments. In addition, we will apply high-field neuroimaging approaches to measure brain structure, function, and neurochemistry. The majority of our efforts this year regarding this project have been spent researching different methods and tools for data collection. We explored different devices and systems to collect data on eye tracking, facial morphology, and electroencephalogram (EEG), and have written contracts for the purchase of these devices based on the results of our research. We have selected different questionnaires and interviews for data collection and have been programming these to store in an electronic database. Several cognitive assessments have also been programmed and tested through staff efforts over the last several months. Writing up the protocol for this project is nearly complete and we plan to submit this in early fall for scientific and IRB review. In addition to these projects, we have simultaneously been utilizing large datasets, including the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study and the Generation R study to examine several research questions. These studies include i). maternal viral infection risk and development of autistic traits; ii). sexual dimorphisms in trajectories of global brain growth over the lifespan, iii). functional connectome fingerprinting in early brain development, iv). the role of plasticizers in the environment and downstream brain development; v). longitudinal study of children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive symptoms; vi). the bidirectional relationship between autistic traits and brain morphology vii). the long-term associations between early-life family functioning and preadolescent white matter microstructure viii). neuroimaging approaches to differentiate the course of anorexia nervosa in adolescent girls; and ix). social responsiveness in children with and without a diagnosis of ASD: cognitive and behavioral correlates.