This project plans to establish sensory phenotypes of a Taiwanese ASD cohort across lifespan, including variety of sensory modalities, sensory domains, and clinical correlates. Also, we will clarify the relationship between sensory phenotypes and social impairment by two specific sensory-social paradigms targeting eye gaze avoidance and social touch anxiety, as well as the atypical neural representation of ASD during eye gaze and viewing social touch by fMRI and EEG.
Sensory disturbance of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are life-long highly-impairing challenges for the individual. Anxiety and fear around the sensory issues significantly threatens the psychological and mental health. As a newly introduced diagnostic criteria of ASD, sensory characteristics becomes a recent focus of ASD research. The ASD population is aging, how their sensory features naturally change with age is particular relevant for their adaptation. However, current literature are limited to childhood and young adults and mostly rely on behavioral report, lacking a clear whole picture of changing sensory phenotype in terms of different sensory modality and sensory domains. Besides, how sensory characteristics in ASD can be quantified by objective measures or explored by qualitative approach, how the sensory sensitivity contributes to the core social deficits in ASD such as eye gaze or social touch avoidance are unclear. This project plans to achieve the following aims: 1. Establish sensory phenotypes of a Taiwanese ASD cohort across lifespan, including variety of sensory modalities (i.e., visual, tactile, auditory, smell/taste, proprioception, etc.), sensory domains (i.e., low registration, sensory seeking, sensory sensitivity, and sensory avoiding), and clinical correlates. 2. Clarify the relationship between sensory phenotypes and social impairment by two specific sensory-social paradigms targeting eye gaze avoidance and social touch anxiety, which are hallmarks of ASD. Factors of emotion types as well as familiarity of faces or social/object touch will be manipulated to examine how they moderate eye tracking and pupil response. 3. Identify the atypical neural representation of ASD during eye gaze and viewing social touch by fMRI and EEG.
Study Type
OBSERVATIONAL
Enrollment
480
no intervention
National Taiwan University Hospital
Taipei, Taiwan
RECRUITINGSensory Profile
It is a self-report scale covers 6 sensory modalities, including taste/smell, motion, visual, tactile, activity, and auditory sensation. The scoring method was based on 4-dimension structure, i.e. Low Registration, Sensation Seeking, Sensory Sensitivity, and Sensation Avoiding. Higher scores mean worse symptoms for each dimension compared to average healthy controls
Time frame: 2 years
Brain activation through fMRI data
MRI scanning session consist of eye-avoidance paradign, social touch paradigm and anatomical scan. Regions of interest for eye avoidance paradigm included brain regions that have been shown to involve face-to-face social and emotional interaction. ROIs for social touch paradigm select the areas that are known to mediate the processing of visually presented social touch scenes.
Time frame: 2 years
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