The purpose of this KO2 proposal is to provide me with time and resources for a combination of career development and research activities designed to enhance my ability to advance developmental science in the area of early perception and attention. My overarching aim is to make basic research in infant and child development more easily translated to applications such as atypical development in disorders such as autism and to natural learning contexts such as home or school. I have created a plan for interweaving my knowledge, training, and basic research on the typical development of attention and intersensory perception with new knowledge, training, and research on atypical attention and intersensory perception in autism, in a way that will result in significant cross-fertilization and value added for each program. This synergistic effect will be accomplished by pursuing career development activities such as directed readings, traveling to conferences and research labs, creating a collaborative research network, learning advanced statistical methods, writing theory and concept papers, and training and mentoring the next generation of scientists, as well as by directly interweaving three research directions designed a priori to inform one another. These research directions converge to focus on how and under what conditions various aspects of social events (a primary basis for cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and communicative development) become salient, attended, and perceived and how this changes across development. The proposed program bridges gaps between research conducted on infants and children, unimodal and multimodal perception, social and nonsocial event perception, and typical and atypical development. The first research direction (my currently funded RO1) assesses the typical development of intersensory perception of social events in infants and young children with a focus on the role of intersensory redundancy in guiding and organizing the development of attention and perception. It uses a combination of infant controlled habituation, reaction time, visual preference, and eye tracking measures. A second research direction (funded by Autism Speaks) assesses attention and intersensory perception of social and nonsocial events in children with autism, typical development, and developmental delay. We have developed a new protocol assessing four basic building blocks of attention (disengagement, orienting, maintenance, intersensory processing) in a single test to clearly characterize attention skills and impairments in autism. Children with autism show a social orienting impairment, with reduced attention to faces, people, and speech. However, we know little about the typical nature, basis and developmental course of attention and perception of social events. In a third (new) research direction, I thus propose to provide the first systematic data base on the typical development of attention to faces, voices, and audiovisual speech, across infancy and early childhood. These studies will bridge critical gaps between knowledge of typical and atypical development and forge direct links between my two current research programs by using common methods, measures, and stimuli across age, from 2- to 36- months. This will provide a comprehensive developmental picture of typical development, serving as a basis for theory in developmental science and providing a developmental context and baseline for evaluating atypical development across infancy and early childhood. If the KO2 proposal is funded, this would allow me the time to pursue the newly proposed research direction and the career development activities designed to integrate my ongoing research program on typical development with that of atypical development. During the next few years, I am uniquely poised to accomplish this goal given the unique and fortunate circumstances of having a funded RO1 on typical development along with a small grant on autism, and trained research teams in place for each program, as well as access to a highly skilled and talented group of collaborators. The additional time afforded by the KO2 award would make it possible to take this integration to the next level through research, training, scholarship, collaboration and mentoring.
This research will reveal new information about the nature, basis and development of attention to social and nonsocial events in infants and children. Findings will provide a wealth of critical information about atypical attention in young children with autism and about the typical development of attention between 2- and 36-months of age, at a level of detail that is novel and necessary for the early identification of atypical patterns of development, including social attention deficits characteristic of autism. Findings are designed to be easily translated to real world settings and can serve as a basis for interventions for developmental delays.
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