Head motion causes artifacts in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, a problem especially relevant for task-free resting state paradigms and for developmental, aging, and clinical populations. In a cohort spanning 7-28 years old (mean age 15) we produced customized head-anatomy-specific Styrofoam molds for each subject that inserted into an MRI head coil. We scanned these subjects under two conditions: using our standard procedure of packing the head coil with foam padding about the head to reduce head motion, and using the customized molds to reduce head motion. Here we report the effects found in our first 13 subjects. In 12 of 13 subjects, the molds reduced head motion throughout the scan, and reduced the fraction of a scan with substantial motion (i.e., volumes with motion notably above baseline levels of motion). Motion was reduced in all 6 head position estimates, especially in rotational, left-right, and superior-inferior directions. Motion was reduced throughout the full age range studied, including children, adolescents, and young adults. In terms of the fMRI data itself, quality indices improved with the head mold on, scrubbing analyses detected less distance-dependent artifact in scans with the head mold on, and distant-dependent artifact was less evident in the scans with the molds on, both for the entire scan and also during only low-motion volumes. Subjects found the molds comfortable. Head molds are thus effective tools for reducing head motion, and motion artifacts, during fMRI scans.

The LENA system was designed and validated to provide information about the language environment in children 0 to 4 years of age and its use has been expanded to populations with a number of communication profiles. Its utility in children 5 years of age and older is not yet known. The present study used acoustic data from two samples of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to evaluate the reliability of LENA automated analyses for detecting speech utterances in older, school age children, and adolescents with ASD, in clinic and home environments. Participants between 5 and 18 years old who were minimally verbal (study 1) or had a range of verbal abilities (study 2) completed standardized assessments in the clinic (study 1 and 2) and in the home (study 2) while speech was recorded from a LENA device. We compared LENA segment labels with manual ground truth coding by human transcribers using two different methods. We found that the automated LENA algorithms were not successful (<50% reliable) in detecting vocalizations from older children and adolescents with ASD, and that the proportion of speaker misclassifications by the automated system increased significantly with the target‐child's age. The findings in children and adolescents with ASD suggest possibly misleading results when expanding the use of LENA beyond the age ranges for which it was developed and highlight the need to develop novel automated methods that are more appropriate for older children. Autism Research 2019, 12: 628–635. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Lay Summary Current commercially available speech detection algorithms (LENA system) were previously validated in toddlers and children up to 48 months of age, and it is not known whether they are reliable in older children and adolescents. Our data suggest that LENA does not adequately capture speech in school age children and adolescents with autism and highlights the need to develop new automated methods for older children.

Eye contact is among the most primary means of social communication used by humans. Quantification of eye contact is valuable as a part of the analysis of social roles and communication skills, and for clinical screening. Estimating a subject’s looking direction is a challenging task, but eye contact can be effectively captured by a wearable point-of-view camera which provides a unique viewpoint. While moments of eye contact from this viewpoint can be hand-coded, such a process tends to be laborious and subjective. In this work, we develop a deep neural network model to automatically detect eye contact in egocentric video. It is the first to achieve accuracy equivalent to that of human experts. We train a deep convolutional network using a dataset of 4,339,879 annotated images, consisting of 103 subjects with diverse demographic backgrounds. 57 subjects have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. The network achieves overall precision of 0.936 and recall of 0.943 on 18 validation subjects, and its performance is on par with 10 trained human coders with a mean precision 0.918 and recall 0.946. Our method will be instrumental in gaze behavior analysis by serving as a scalable, objective, and accessible tool for clinicians and researchers.

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The present study tested whether salient affective cues would negatively influence cognitive control in children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). 100 children aged 6-12 years who were either typically developing or had ASD performed a novel go/nogo task to cues of their interest versus cues of non-interest. Linear Mixed-Effects models for hit rate, false alarms and the sensitivity index d-prime were used to test for group differences. Caregivers completed the Repetitive Behavior Scale-Revised (RBS-R) to test associations between repetitive behaviors and task performance. Children with ASD had reduced cognitive control towards their interests compared to typically developing children. Further, children with ASD showed reduced cognitive control to interests compared to non-interests, a pattern not observed in typically developing children. Decreased cognitive control towards interests was associated with higher insistence on sameness behavior in ASD, but there was no association between sameness behavior and cognitive control for non-interests. Together, children with ASD demonstrated decreased cognitive flexibility in the context of increased affective salience related to interests. These results provide a mechanism for how salient affective cues, such as interests, interfere with daily functioning and social communication in ASD. Further, the findings have broader clinical implications for understanding how affective cues can drive interactions between restricted patterns of behavior and cognitive control.

The activities we choose to spend our leisure time with are intrinsically motivating and vary across individuals. Yet it is unknown how impulse control or neural activity changes when processing a preferred stimulus related to a hobby or interest. Developing a task that assesses the response to preferred interests is of importance as it would be relevant to a range of psychiatric disorders that have hyper- or hypo-arousal to such cues. During functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), 39 healthy adults completed a novel task to test approach behavior and cognitive control to cues that were personalized to the participants’ interests compared to stimuli the participants identified as being of non-interest and colored shapes. fMRI results showed that cues of one’s interest elicited activation in the anterior insula compared to colored shapes. Interests did not change inhibition compared to non-interests and colored shapes and all stimuli equally engaged a frontostriatal circuit. Together the results suggest that adults were sensitive to their interests but were effective at regulating their impulses towards these cues, a skill that is critical for navigating the temptations and distractions in our daily environment.

The present cross-sectional study tested for differences in motivation during adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood in autism. 156 typically developing individuals and 79 individuals with autism ages 10-30 years of age completed a go/nogo task with social and non-social cues. To assess age effects, linear (age increasing or decreasing) and quadratic (adolescent-specific) models were used. Consistent with prior studies, typically developing adolescents and young adults demonstrated more false alarms for positive relative to neutral social cues. In autism, there were no changes in attention across age for social or non-social cues. The lack of an age effect in autism suggests reduced orienting to motivating cues during adolescence and early adulthood. The findings provide an additional perspective to explain the unique challenges for adolescents with autism as well as difficulties with transitioning to adulthood.

We created a novel social feedback paradigm to study how motivation for potential social links is influenced in adolescents and adults. 88 participants (42F/46M) created online posts and then expended physical effort to show their posts to other users, who varied in number of followers and probability of positive feedback. We focused on two populations of particular interest from a social feedback perspective: adolescents relative to young adults (13–17 vs 18–24 years of age), and participants with social anxiety symptoms. Individuals with higher self-reported symptoms of social anxiety did not follow the typical pattern of increased effort to obtain social feedback from high status peers. Adolescents were more willing to exert physical effort on the task than young adults. Overall, participants were more likely to exert physical effort for high social status users and for users likely to yield positive feedback, and men were more likely to exert effort than women, findings that parallel prior results in effort-based tasks with financial rather than social rewards. Together the findings suggest social motivation is malleable, driven by factors of social status and the likelihood of a positive social outcome, and that age, sex, and social anxiety significantly impact patterns of socially motivated decision-making.