Fabio Apicella

Motherese in Interaction: At the Cross-Road of Emotion and Cognition? (A Systematic Review)

Various aspects of motherese also known as infant-directed speech (IDS) have been studied for many years. As it is a widespread phenomenon, it is suspected to play some important roles in infant development. Therefore, our purpose was to provide an update of the evidence accumulated by reviewing all of the empirical or experimental studies that have been published since 1966 on IDS driving factors and impacts. Two databases were screened and 144 relevant studies were retained. General linguistic and prosodic characteristics of IDS were found in a variety of languages, and IDS was not restricted to mothers. IDS varied with factors associated with the caregiver (e.g., cultural, psychological and physiological) and the infant (e.g., reactivity and interactive feedback). IDS promoted infants’ affect, attention and language learning. Cognitive aspects of IDS have been widely studied whereas affective ones still need to be developed. However, during interactions, the following two observations were notable: (1) IDS prosody reflects emotional charges and meets infants’ preferences, and (2) mother-infant contingency and synchrony are crucial for IDS production and prolongation. Thus, IDS is part of an interactive loop that may play an important role in infants’ cognitive and social development.

Analysis of unsupported gait in toddlers with autism

AIMS A number of studies have suggested the importance of motor development in autism. Motor development has been considered a possible bio-marker of autism since it does not depend on either social or linguistic development. In this study, using retrospective video analysis we investigated the first unsupported gait in toddlers with autism. METHODS Fifty-five toddlers, belonging to three groups were recruited: toddlers with autistic disorder (AD, n=20, age 14.2mo, sd 1.4mo) and as comparison groups: typically developing toddlers (TD, n=20, age 12.9mo, sd 1.1mo) and toddlers with non-autistic developmental delays of mixed aetiology (DD, n=15, age 13.1mo, sd 0.8mo). The Walking Observation Scale (WOS) and the Positional Pattern for Symmetry during Walking (PPSW) were used to gather data on the first unsupported gait. The WOS includes 11 items that analyze gait through three axes: foot movements; arm movements; general movements while the PPSW analyses static and dynamical symmetry during gait. RESULTS Our results have identified significant differences in gait patterns among the group of toddlers with AD as opposed to the control groups. Significant differences between AD and the two control groups were found for both WOS (p<.001) and PPSW (p<.001). CONCLUSION The specificity of motor disturbances we have identified in autism (postural asymmetry) is consistent with previous findings that implicated cerebellar involvement in the motor symptoms of autism.

On the application of quantitative EEG for characterizing autistic brain: a systematic review

Autism-Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are thought to be associated with abnormalities in neural connectivity at both the global and local levels. Quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) is a non-invasive technique that allows a highly precise measurement of brain function and connectivity. This review encompasses the key findings of QEEG application in subjects with ASD, in order to assess the relevance of this approach in characterizing brain function and clustering phenotypes. QEEG studies evaluating both the spontaneous brain activity and brain signals under controlled experimental stimuli were examined. Despite conflicting results, literature analysis suggests that QEEG features are sensitive to modification in neuronal regulation dysfunction which characterize autistic brain. QEEG may therefore help in detecting regions of altered brain function and connectivity abnormalities, in linking behavior with brain activity, and subgrouping affected individuals within the wide heterogeneity of ASD. The use of advanced techniques for the increase of the specificity and of spatial localization could allow finding distinctive patterns of QEEG abnormalities in ASD subjects, paving the way for the development of tailored intervention strategies.

Computerized home video detection for motherese may help to study impaired interaction between infants who become autistic and their parents

Autism is a well‐defined clinical syndrome after the second year of life, but information on autism in the first two years of life is still lacking. The study of home videos has described children with autism during the first year of life as not displaying the rigid pattern typical of later symptoms. Therefore, developmental/environmental factors are claimed in addition to genetic/biological ones to explain the onset of autism during maturation. Here we describe (1) a developmental hypothesis focusing on the possible implication of motherese impoverishment during the course of parent–infant interactions as a possible co‐factor; (2) the methodological approach we used to develop a computerized algorithm to detect motherese in home videos; (3) the best configuration performance of the detector in extracting motherese from home video sequences (accuracy = 82% on speaker‐independent versus 87.5% on speaker‐dependent) that we should use to test this hypothesis. Copyright

Neuropsychological functioning in children and adolescents with restrictive-type anorexia nervosa: An in-depth investigation with NEPSY-II

Several studies have investigated the neuropsychological functioning of patients with anorexia nervosa restrictive type (AN-r), but results are conflicting. Here we compared the neuropsychological profile of 23 female children and adolescents with AN-r and of 46 typical controls (aged 9–16 years) using the second edition of the NEPSY (a Developmental Neuropsychology Assessment) neuropsychological battery. AN-r patients presented subtle cognitive flexibility impairments in audiomotor responses (p = .033). Conversely, superior performance in verbal fluency (p = .024) and memory (p = .034) was observed only in AN-r patients with an associated unipolar mood disorder. This profile of marginally impaired and enhanced performance was independent from illness duration and starvation degree, suggesting that it may preexist and represent a vulnerability factor for the disease onset.

Classification of autism spectrum disorder using supervised learning of brain connectivity measures extracted from synchrostates

OBJECTIVE The paper investigates the presence of autism using the functional brain connectivity measures derived from electro-encephalogram (EEG) of children during face perception tasks. APPROACH Phase synchronized patterns from 128-channel EEG signals are obtained for typical children and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The phase synchronized states or synchrostates temporally switch amongst themselves as an underlying process for the completion of a particular cognitive task. We used 12 subjects in each group (ASD and typical) for analyzing their EEG while processing fearful, happy and neutral faces. The minimal and maximally occurring synchrostates for each subject are chosen for extraction of brain connectivity features, which are used for classification between these two groups of subjects. Among different supervised learning techniques, we here explored the discriminant analysis and support vector machine both with polynomial kernels for the classification task. MAIN RESULTS The leave one out cross-validation of the classification algorithm gives 94.7% accuracy as the best performance with corresponding sensitivity and specificity values as 85.7% and 100% respectively. SIGNIFICANCE The proposed method gives high classification accuracies and outperforms other contemporary research results. The effectiveness of the proposed method for classification of autistic and typical children suggests the possibility of using it on a larger population to validate it for clinical practice.

Fusiform Gyrus responses to neutral and emotional faces in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: a High Density ERP study

Face processing is a neural mechanism that allows understanding social information and cues conveyed by faces, whose dysfunction has been postulated to underlie some of the behavioral impairments characterizing autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A special region of the cortex, the fusiform gyrus (FG), is believed to be the specific area for processing face features and emotions. However, behavioral, fMRI and ERP studies addressed to investigate the role of FG dysfunction in ASD have led to conflicting results. Using a high-density EEG system, we recorded the face-sensitive ERP to neutral and emotional (happiness and fearful) faces, as a measure of early activity of the FG, in children with high functioning ASD. By controlling a number of experimental and clinical variables that could have biased previous research--such as gaze direction, attention to tasks, stimulus appearance and clinical profiles--we aimed to assess the effective role of the FG in the face emotion processing deficit hypothesized in ASD. No significant differences in early face-sensitive ERP components were found between ASD and neurotypical children. However, a systematic latency delay and amplitude reduction of all early potentials were observed in the ASD group, regardless of the stimulus, although more evident for emotions. Therefore, we can assume a diffuse dysfunction of neural mechanisms and networks in driving and integrating social information conveyed by faces, in particular when emotions are involved, rather than a specific impairment of the FG-related face processing circuit. Nevertheless, there is need of further investigation.

Difference in Visual Social Predispositions Between Newborns at Low- and High-risk for Autism

Some key behavioural traits of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been hypothesized to be due to impairments in the early activation of subcortical orienting mechanisms, which in typical development bias newborns to orient to relevant social visual stimuli. A challenge to testing this hypothesis is that autism is usually not diagnosed until a child is at least 3 years old. Here, we circumvented this difficulty by studying for the very first time, the predispositions to pay attention to social stimuli in newborns with a high familial risk of autism. Results showed that visual preferences to social stimuli strikingly differed between high-risk and low-risk newborns. Significant predictors for high-risk newborns were obtained and an accurate biomarker was identified. The results revealed early behavioural characteristics of newborns with familial risk for ASD, allowing for a prospective approach to the emergence of autism in early infancy.

Parieto-Frontal Circuits During Observation of Hidden and Visible Motor Acts in Children. A High-density EEG Source Imaging Study

Several studies showed that in the human brain specific premotor and parietal areas are activated during the execution and observation of motor acts. The activation of this premotor-parietal network displaying the so-called Mirror Mechanism (MM) was proposed to underpin basic forms of action understanding. However, the functional properties of the MM in children are still largely unknown. In order to address this issue, we recorded high-density EEG from 12 children (6 female, 6 male; average age 10.5, SD ±2.15). Data were collected when children observed video clips showing hands grasping objects in two different experimental conditions: (1) Full Vision, in which the motor act was fully visible; (2) Hidden, in which the interaction between the hand and the object was not visible. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and topographic map analyses were used to investigate the temporal pattern of the ERPs and their brain source of localization, employing a children template of the Montreal Neurological Institute. Results showed that two different parieto-premotor circuits are activated by the observation of object-related hand reaching-to-grasping motor acts in children. The first circuit comprises the ventral premotor and the inferior parietal cortices. The second one comprises the dorsal premotor and superior parietal cortices. The activation of both circuits is differently lateralized and modulated in time, and influenced by the amount of visual information available about the hand grasping-related portion of the observed motor acts.

Reciprocity in Interaction: A Window on the First Year of Life in Autism

From early infancy onwards, young children appear motivated to engage reciprocally with others and share psychological states during dyadic interactions. Although poor reciprocity is one of the defining features of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), few studies have focused on the direct assessment of real-life reciprocal behavior; consequently, our knowledge of the nature and the development of this core feature of autism is still limited. In this study, we describe the phenomenon of reciprocity in infant-caregiver interaction by analyzing family movies taken during the first year of life of 10 infants with ASD and 9 infants with typical development (TD). We analyzed reciprocal behaviors by means of a coding scheme developed for this purpose (caregiver-infant reciprocity scale (CIRS)). Infants with ASD displayed less motor activity during the first semester and subsequently fewer vocalizations, compared to TD infants. Caregivers of ASD infants showed in the second semester shorter periods of involvement and a reduction of affectionate touch. These results suggest that from the first months of life a nonsynchronic motor-vocal pattern may interfere in different ways with the development of reciprocity in the primary relationship between infants later diagnosed with ASD and their caregivers.