2012 — 2021 |
Ramsay, Gordon James |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
Data Management and Analysis Core
The objecfive of the Emory ACE Data Management & Analysis Core is to create an opfimal scientific and technical environment for creating growth charts of social engagement from densely-sampled longitudinal data sets co-registered across multiple domains in order to explore mechanisms of risk and resilience in autism, a key aim of Projects l-V as well as the whole program project. To accomplish this goal, the Core will provide shared resources, facilities and expertise for data collection, processing, analysis, storage and retrieval to serve the entire program project, as well as acting as a common repository for sharing data between individual projects and transmitting results to NDAR. The specific aims of the Core are: (1) Data Management: to meet the uniquely challenging data processing, management, storage and transmission needs of the entire program project; (2) Data Analysis: to provide a common methodological framework and shared computational infrastructure for carrying out state-of-the-art developmental profiling and statistical analysis of experimental measures collected across Projects l-V; (3) Training and Reliability: to provide common training in all of the novel data analysis techniques employed across projects, and to ensure that those techniques are deployed consistently and reliably across projects, using appropriate procedures for data management; and (4) Quality Control: to ensure that all data arising from the program project are of uniformly and exceptionally high quality, suitable for publicafion, submission to NDAR, and immediate use by other scientists. Key personnel will provide expertise in mathematical analysis, biostatistics, software engineering, and data processing needed to achieve the specific aims of each project. Shared facilifies and infrastructure will be made available to support the data management and analysis needs of each project, including a central supercomputing facility, local workstations, and a suite of software tools customized for the data processing required in each project. Data management will be centralized on a common data server using RexDB, a custom-designed database commissioned from Prometheus Research specifically to handle large-volume clinical, behavioral, and experimental data sets, and their transmission to NDAR. RELEVANCE (See instructions): This research will generate a unique collecfion of large-scale data sets based on clinical, behavioral, and experimental measures that map out the developmental unfolding of autism over the first years of life. The Emory ACE Data Management & Analysis Core will ensure that the full potenfial for sharing our data, extracting new information about autism, and rapidly translating that information into practice is realized, addressing the Interagency Aufism Committee objectives for Eariy Detection, Data Sharing and Resources.
|
0.958 |
2012 — 2016 |
Ramsay, Gordon James |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
The Ontogeny of Social Vocal Engagement and Its Derailment in Autism
Ten years of pioneering research capitalizing on eye-tracking technology to measure spontaneous visual scanning behavior in viewing of naturalistic situations have demonstrated that infants at risk of developing autism spectrum disorders (ASD) display atypical patterns of visual attention in the first year of life, a period when social engagement with faces is crucial for the transition to spoken language. Expanding our programmatic effort in the Emory ACE to track the ontogeny of social engagement and its derailment in autism. Project II will map out the developmental unfolding of social vocal engagement over the first three years of life, to explore the consequences of eariy derailment of social visual engagement investigated in Project I. By tracking the development of spoken language in Project II concurrently with eye-tracking measures of visual attention to talking faces in Project I from 2 to 36 months in a cohort of 235 infants with ASD, non-autistic developmental delays (DD) and typical development (TD), the close synergy between these two projects will shed light on the relationship between two core deficits defining ASD, as well as suggesting mechanisms for targeted eariy intervention exploited in Project III. The goal of Project II is to test the hypothesis that the derailment of emerging communication in infants at risk of autism can be attributed to an eariier breakdown in mechanisms of social engagement. The first aim is to quantify eariy vocal behavior and spoken language development in TD, DD, and ASD infants, based on automated acoustic analysis of day-long audio recordings of each child's language environment collected at monthly intervals from 2-36 months in the home. The second aim is to determine the relationship between social engagement in the first year of life and spoken language development in the first three years of life. The third aim is to determine whether developmental profiles for quantitative measures of visual attention (using eye-tracking measures) and spoken language development (using acoustic measures) within the first two years of life can together be used as: (a) categorical diagnostic markers; (b) predictors of autistic symptomatology; (c) a means of defining endophenotypes within the autism spectrum, linking risk, diagnosis and outcome.
|
0.958 |
2017 — 2021 |
Ramsay, Gordon James |
P50Activity Code Description: To support any part of the full range of research and development from very basic to clinical; may involve ancillary supportive activities such as protracted patient care necessary to the primary research or R&D effort. The spectrum of activities comprises a multidisciplinary attack on a specific disease entity or biomedical problem area. These grants differ from program project grants in that they are usually developed in response to an announcement of the programmatic needs of an Institute or Division and subsequently receive continuous attention from its staff. Centers may also serve as regional or national resources for special research purposes. |
Pathways of Social Contingency For Navigating Developmental Landscapes of Risk in Asd: Developmental Progressions and Pivotal Transitions in Infant-Caregiver Vocal Interaction
PROJECT SUMMARY Five years of research in the Emory ACE have provided compelling evidence for a causal link between early deficits in social engagement and later deficits in speech and language in infants at risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) across every stage of vocal development, beginning in the first months of life. Developmental progressions in vocal behavior are found not only in the infant, but also in the caregiver, and progressions in both infant and caregiver are disrupted by autism, suggesting that detection and intervention targeting spoken communication in ASD should be grounded in measuring and manipulating social contingency in dyadic interactions early in life, attending to the mother as well as the child. Extending our research to explore these findings, Project II will identify developmental progressions in social contingency between infant and caregiver, discover active ingredients and developmental windows of opportunity for key mechanisms of social interaction that scaffold early vocal development and the emergence of speech and language, and determine how these differ in autism and typical development. A new cohort of 150 high-risk infants and 100 low-risk controls from 0 to 30 months will allow us to analyze effects of sex, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The first specific aim is to identify pivotal transitions in vocal behavior and social contingency in both infant and caregiver over the first three years of life. Based on automated analysis of home audio recordings sampled longitudinally at monthly intervals, we map out developmental progressions in patterns of infant-directed and adult-directed vocal behavior, and identify periods where there are significant changes in typical development and delays or deviations in autism. The second specific aim is to identify mechanisms responsible for pivotal transitions, in infant and caregiver. By measuring differences in acoustic cues and timing patterns in infant/adult-directed speech over development, we identify active ingredients of vocal signaling that mediate transitions, and test whether infants/caregivers are producing/responding to signals appropriately. The third specific aim is to evaluate the performance of developmental trajectories of social contingency and vocal behavior as biomarkers of risk and predictors of treatment response and outcome. Combining results across Projects I-IV, we test the hypothesis that measures of early social contingency are more effective at predicting speech and language outcome in infants at risk of ASD than measures of early vocal production. We predict that treatment paradigms targeting social contingency between infant and caregiver are more effective at promoting speech development than those that target speech development in the infant alone. This research addresses all four aims of the NIMH Strategic Plan.
|
0.958 |