Fundamental Investigation for Objective Indices on Social Disturbance of the Children with Autism

2002 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 12480048
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: 教科教育
• Research Institution: JIKH UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE (2001-2002); Akita University (2000)
• Principal Investigator: YAGUCHI Kiyoshi Jikei University, School of Medicine, Professor, 医学部, 教授 (50200481)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): SHINODA Haruo Ibaragi Univercity Faculty of Education, 教育学部, 助教授 (90235549) ; TOJO Yoshikuni the National Institute of Special Education Branch: Section of Education for Children witii Autism, 分室, 室長 (00132720)
• Project Period (FY): 2000 – 2002
• Keywords: Autism / Social disturbance / Event related potentials / P3a / FSb / Passive attention / Active attention

Research Abstract

It is well known that children with autism hardly respond to Iheir name when called, and show little interest in speech sound We recorded event related potentials on schod age children with high functioning autism and compared these potentials to those of same aged normal children. We assumed that they would have some disturbance to attend and/or percept incoming information. Because socially meaningful stimulus events are physically complex, a deficiency in sensory processing of complex stimuli has been suggested to contribute to the aberrant attentionand language in autism.
In the first project year, acoustically matched simple tones, complex tones, and vowels were presented in separate oddball sequences, in which a repetitive, "standard" sound was occasionally replaced by an infrequent, "deviant" sound differing from the standard in frequency (by 7%). In addition to sensory responses, deviant sounds elicited an ERP index of automatic soundchange discrimination, the mismatch negativity (MMN), and an ERP index of attention orienting, the P3a.
No significant difference was observed on MMN and P3a between both groups.This means that the sensory sound processing and passive attention processwere intact in the Mgh-functioning children with autism and they were not affected by sound complexity or "speechness".
In the second and third project years both groups attended to vowel discrimination tasks and recorded ERR Significant difference was observed only in the P3b index between both groups. It was suggested that the children with autism have some difficulty in allocating active attention to the social significance of incoming information.
In this third year, we also recorded ERP during eye direction discrimination tasks. The children with autism did not show mutual gaze effect on reaction time and ERP. We suppose thesefacts should contribute gready to the difficulty which children with autism experience in establishing human relationships.