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The aim of the current study was to investigate subtle characteristics of social perception and interpretation in high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), and to study the relation between watching and interpreting. As a novelty, we used an approach that combined moment-by-moment eye tracking and verbal assessment. Sixteen young adults with ASD and 16 neurotypical control participants watched a video depicting a complex communication situation while their eye movements were tracked. The participants also completed a verbal task with questions related to the pragmatic content of the video. We compared verbal task scores and eye movements between groups, and assessed correlations between task performance and eye movements. Individuals with ASD had more difficulty than the controls in interpreting the video, and during two short moments there were significant group differences in eye movements. Additionally, we found significant correlations between verbal task scores and moment-level eye movement in the ASD group, but not among the controls. We concluded that participants with ASD had slight difficulties in understanding the pragmatic content of the video stimulus and attending to social cues, and that the connection between pragmatic understanding and eye movements was more pronounced for participants with ASD than for neurotypical participants.

Increasing concentrations of anesthetics in the blood induce a continuum of neurophysiological changes, which reflect on the electroencephalogram (EEG). EEG-based depth of anesthesia assessment requires that the signal samples are correctly associated with the neurophysiological changes occurring at different anesthetic levels. A novel method is presented to estimate the phase of the continuum using the feature data extracted from EEG. The feature data calculated from EEG sequences corresponding to continuously deepening anesthesia are considered to form a one-dimensional nonlinear manifold in the multidimensional feature space. Utilizing a recently proposed algorithm, Isomap, the dimensionality of the feature data is reduced to achieve a one-dimensional embedding representing this manifold and thereby the continuum of neurophysiological changes during induction of anesthesia. The Isomap-based estimation is validated with data recorded from nine patients during induction of propofol anesthesia. The proposed method provides a novel approach to assess neurophysiological changes during anesthesia and offers potential for the development of more advanced systems for the depth of anesthesia monitoring.

In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic features were derived and automatically computed from the speech samples. Two application scenarios were tested: the first scenario was speaker-independent for a small domain of speakers while the second scenario was completely speaker-independent. Human listening experiments were conducted to assess the perceptual adequacy of the emotional speech samples. Statistical classification experiments indicated that, with the optimal combination of prosodic feature vectors, automatic emotion discrimination performance close to human emotion recognition ability was achievable.

Asperger's syndrome (AS) belongs to the group of autism spectrum disorders and is characterized by deficits in social interaction, as manifested e.g. by the lack of social or emotional reciprocity. The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social interaction. Abnormal prosody has been frequently identified as a core feature of AS. There are virtually no studies on recognition of basic emotions from speech. This study focuses on how adolescents with AS (n=12) and their typically developed controls (n=15) recognize the basic emotions happy, sad, angry, and 'neutral' from speech prosody. Adolescents with AS recognized basic emotions from speech prosody as well as their typically developed controls did. Possibly the recognition of basic emotions develops during the childhood.