Several undergraduates are also involved in the project. ![]() "We're now left with the hard problems, in which the deficit is not so much in one localized region, but in the network and the way brain regions talk to each other to implement complex functions."Īlong with the technical and administrative costs of the research, the ARRA grant funds one full-time research assistant in Belmonte's lab. In the 20th century, neurobiologists had success tackling problems tied to a circumscribed brain region, he added. "The field is starting to recognize that you need to do this correlative cross-domain work to figure out what's developmentally related." The project's broad, multivariate scope is part of an emerging trend in autism research, he said. "We're going to be looking at that in much larger numbers now using EEG," Belmonte said. While the subjects grapple with asteroids, pilot spacecrafts, intercept pirates and salvage hidden cargo, the computer logs how rapidly they shift attention and engage or inhibit motor responses how well they perceive coherent motion and whether they can intuit the motivations of other characters.Īfter the subjects are comfortable with the game on their own, Belmonte uses electroencephalography (EEG) in the lab to measure patterns in neural connectivity as they play.Įarlier research has shown that while autistic children and their unaffected siblings share some physiological traits, including frontal lobes that are slower to activate, the overall patterns of neural connectivity are weaker in autistic children compared with their unaffected siblings. "When we look at people with autism in a lab, it's not clear that we're testing them under naturalistic conditions, because one of the hallmarks of autism is very high levels of anxiety - anxiety with new people, and anxiety with new places," he said.Īs a consequence, researchers often can't be sure if their findings are due to autism itself or simply heightened anxiety.īelmonte gets around that by giving the games to subjects on laptops to take home and play at their own pace. ![]() He also hopes to sidestep a confounding factor common to autism research. In this experiment, he hopes to find links between social and nonsocial theories and between behavioral and physiological data. "We each have our individual pet theories, and we each - me included - have designed experiments within these narrow theoretical apertures to confirm or refute hypotheses that are stated along our single tracks." ![]() "Autism has been characterized as a fundamental perceptual abnormality it's been characterized as a fundamental attentional abnormality it's been characterized as a failure of theory-of-mind," he said. Unlike much of the current research on autism, which isolates and tests a single domain, Belmonte designed the user-friendly video games with embedded tasks that test users - children with autism or Asperger syndrome ages 10 to 15, along with their unaffected siblings - across multiple domains. Development of the video game suite, called Astropolis, was supported in part by a grant from Autism Speaks. Matthew Belmonte, assistant professor of human development and a 2009 recipient of the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development Award, is using a novel tool - a suite of science-fiction-themed video games he developed with collaborators in computer sciences - to find order behind the range of autism's manifestations.īelmonte's NSF Early Career award, of $700,000 over five years, is funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). One of the hallmarks of autism is a need to find order, or to try to create it, in a world that can often seem chaotic and disorganized.īut for researchers trying to understand the disorder, which can affect perception, cognition, social and motor skills, communication and other domains, autism itself can seem incoherent and enigmatic.
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