Individuals with autism often report difficulties in processing sensory information. Here, April Levin aims to develop objective measures of how the nervous system processes sensory information, using electroencephalography to measure neural activity in response to sound and touch in both typically developing children and those with autism. The long-term goal of this project is to enhance the understanding of mechanisms underlying sensory processing difficulties in autism, as well as to develop biomarkers for clinical trials.

As a supplement to a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded IBIS Network study of magnetic resonance imaging predictors of ASD in high familial risk (HR) infants, Shafali Spurling Jeste proposes using electroencephalography and eye-tracking biomarkers to test more scalable predictors of ASD. This study will involve participants from the same cohort as the larger NIH study, which includes recruitment from five sites across the United States. Findings from this project may lead to more accurate early presymptomatic identification and more timely intervention for HR infants.

Impairments in social communication are among the core symptoms of ASD, but at present, there are no validated tools that can be used to evaluate social communication outcomes in clinical trials. Researchers from three sites across the United States will validate two newly developed treatment outcome measures — the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC) and Elicitation of Language Samples for Analysis (ELSA) over the course of an ASD behavioral intervention trial (JASPER).