School of Medicine
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Daniel Arthur Abrams
Clinical Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Current Research and Scholarly Interests Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are among the most pervasive neurodevelopmental disorders and are characterized by significant deficits in social communication. A common observation in children with ASD is that affected individuals often “tune out” from social interactions, which likely impacts the development of social, communication, and language skills. My primary research goals are to understand why children with ASD often tune out from the social world and how this impacts social skill and brain development, and to identify remediation strategies that motivate children with ASD to engage in social interactions. The theoretical framework that guides my work is that social impairments in ASD stem from a primary deficit in identifying social stimuli, such as human voices and faces, as rewarding and salient stimuli, thereby precluding children with ASD from engaging with these stimuli.
My program of research has provided important information regarding the brain circuits underlying social deficits in ASD. Importantly, these findings have consistently implicated key structures of the brain’s reward and salience processing systems, and support the hypothesis that impaired reward attribution to social stimuli is a critical aspect of social difficulties in ASD. The first study produced by this program of research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and showed that children with ASD have weak brain connectivity between voice processing regions of cortex and the distributed reward circuit and amygdala. Moreover, the strength of these speech-reward brain connections predicted social communication abilities in these children. A second study, which was recently published in eLife, examined neural processing of mother’s voice, a biologically salient and implicitly rewarding sound which is associated with cognitive and social development, in children with ASD. Results from this study identified a relationship between social communication abilities in children with ASD and brain activation in reward and salience processing regions during mother’s voice processing. A third study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that mother’s voice activates an extended voice processing network, including reward and salience processing regions, in typically developing children. Moreover, the strength of brain connectivity between voice-selective and reward and salience processing regions predicted social communication abilities in these neurotypical children. Together, results provide novel support for the hypothesis that deficits in representing the reward value of social stimuli, including the human voice, impede children with ASD from actively engaging with these stimuli and consequently impair social skill development.
My future research will leverage these findings by examining several important questions related to social information processing in children with ASD. First, we aim to study longitudinal development of social brain circuitry in minimally verbal children with ASD, a severely affected subpopulation that has been vastly underrepresented in the ASD literature. Second, we aim to examine the efficacy of naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions, such as Pivotal Response Treatment, for children with ASD and their relation to changes in social brain and reward circuitry. Third, we aim to examine distinct neural profiles in female children with ASD who, on average, have better social communication abilities compared to their male counterparts. -
Ehsan Adeli
Instructor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Current Research and Scholarly Interests My research lies in the intersection of Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Medical Imaging.
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Naoyuki Asada
Affiliate, Psych/Major Laboratories and Clinical & Translational Neurosciences Incubator
Bio Education:
- Bachelor of Science, University of Tokyo (2007)
- Master of Science, University of Tokyo (2009)
- Doctor of Philosophy, University of Tokyo (2012)
Professional Experience:
- Pharmacological Researcher, Daiichi-Sankyo Co., Ltd. (2012-present) -
Daniel Bowling
Instructor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Bio Daniel is a neuroscientist focused on auditory-vocal function in human social communication. His expertise covers psychological, neurobiological, and acoustic perspectives on speech and music, their conveyance of affect, social-significance, and origins in mammalian vocal behavior. He combines psychophysiological, psychoacoustic, neuroendocrine and pharmacological methods to study perception and behavior in human subjects. Daniel graduated from the University of California San Diego in 2006 with summa cum laude honors in Biological Psychology (BS) and Neurophilosophy (BA). He holds a graduate certificate in Cognitive Neuroscience from Duke University (2009), and a PhD in Neurobiology from Duke University School of Medicine (2012). His postdoc at the University of Vienna (2012-18) focused on bioacoustics and auditory-motor synchrony. He is a recipient of multiple awards including a young investigator award from the University of Vienna Faculty of Life Sciences, and an innovation award from the Social and Affective Neuroscience society. At Stanford, he is translating his interdisciplinary background to autism spectrum disorder, where the social consequences of auditory-vocal impairments are only now beginning to be understood. Along the way, Daniel has been fortunate to be mentored by Patricia Churchland B.Phil., Dale Purves M.D., Tecumseh Fitch Ph.D., and Karen Parker Ph.D.
