Alexandra Bey
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience·Early-career
Early childhood is a key window for autism interventions that build social skills for life. However, there are no objective, brain-based measures of social engagement that could show who benefits from a therapy or how children change over time.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
autism
electroencephalography
biomarkers
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Confirm that less looking at social than nonsocial images goes with lower beta-1 and higher theta EEG brain rhythms in autistic preschoolers, using EEG recorded at the same time as automated eye-gaze tracking.
- Relate these EEG power measures to carefully coded social engagement during child-caregiver interaction in autistic preschoolers.
- Follow children over time to test whether changes in EEG measures track changes in standardized assessments of social communication.
- Explore new functional connectivity measures, which show how brain regions coordinate, and test whether they relate to social attention and social engagement.
More about the research
This career development project trains the PI, a neuroscientist and child psychiatrist, to develop such measures using electroencephalography (EEG), which records the brain's electrical activity through sensors on the scalp.
Why it matters
Objective brain measures of social engagement could help clinicians and researchers sort autistic children by their needs. They could also make it easier to test whether early interventions work. This could support the development of better therapies for young autistic children and give a clearer picture of how autism differs from child to child.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Chung Yin Joseph Lau
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether the balance between top-down expectation signals and local speech representations is disrupted in autism, using EEG to measure context-dependent processing of speech sounds.
Margaret Reynolds
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Measure gains in visual acuity, using Teller acuity testing, in children with autism spectrum disorder after refractive surgery for refractive error that glasses cannot address.
Sampath Jayarathna
Old Dominion University, VA·Computer Science·Early-career
Build a "streaming hub," a framework for real-time, computationally efficient processing of eye-tracking data from one or more users, in place of offline batch analysis.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.