Autism-Spectrum-Disorder (ASD) patients often present impairment in cooperative behavior and deficits in social motor synchrony, but the altered brain mechanisms at the basis of such functions in ASD haven't been completely described. Moreover, although cooperative and motor coordination functions involve interaction with others, most social neuroscience studies so far focused on the processes occurring in a single brain, thus missing the opportunity to investigate the entire interacting system. Recently, methodological and technical improvements in signal recordings and processing techniques successfully allowed the study of multiple-brain systems by means of simultaneous recordings from multiple subjects, a technique called hyperscanning. Despite the advancements in this field, such approach has never been applied to autism as an instrument to investigate the specific interaction established during a social exchange.
With this project involving biomedical engineering, social neuroscience and clinical psychology, we aim to study EEG-hyperscanning from pairs including an ASD patient involved in real-life interactions by the exploration of a crucial but deviant social ability in ASD: cooperative joint action. In addition, we aim to develop and implement a new instrument for the real-time monitoring of multiple-subject systems during the simultaneous recording of EEG brain signals from dyads of interacting subjects. Using mathematical indices derived directly from brain signals during a social exchange, we intend to characterise instantaneously as well as long-term natural reciprocal changing and adaptation in ASD. This highly multidisciplinary project can represent a first step to identify the earliest signs of atypical neurodevelopment in ASD. In the long perspective, the ambitious goal of this project can lead to identify objective measurements of therapeutic outcome directly in the brain and to novel clinical treatments in autism in a real-time setting.
This highly multidisciplinary project, involving biomedical engineering, social neuroscience and clinical psychology has the overall goal to create a new branch of clinical neurosciences, moving from the single-brain model of cognition towards a multiple-brain neuroscience able to provide a significant contribution to the understanding of the brain mechanisms of autism. This is the first time that a multiple-subject neurophysiological modeling is adopted to investigate the neural basis of social impairment in autistic patients. Our hypothesis is that the neural mechanisms at the basis of the cooperative behavior, and their alterations in patients with autism, can be understood and described more effectively and in more depth by a multiple-subjects approach than by a single subject approach, and that the hyperscanning framework we propose is able to capture and quantify the alterations in neural correlates of ASD patients with respect to normally developing subjects, capturing the specific relationship established during the experiments between the patient and the healthy subject. Moreover, we aim to go beyond the state-of-the-art in the hyperscanning technique by providing a tool for the real-time monitoring of the dynamical evolvement of a social relationship at neurophysiological level. Actually, despite the fact that all social interactions are in constant evolution, the current methods for multiple-brain connectivity estimation require large amounts of data, and are consequently performed off-line by grouping data related to similar behavior. As a consequence, the characterization of the relationship in terms of its evolution in time is missed. On the contrary, the development of a tool for the real-time monitoring in hyperscanning studies will allow to capture and characterize the different aspects of the (un)successful cooperative relationship.
This tool will provide a result per se and a contribution to social neuroscience, with an impact to the basic research. Its application to patients' data, envisaged at the end of the present project, will open new perspectives in the clinical neuroscience that may include:
(i) the identification of the drivers of non-optimal cooperative social interaction, useful to develop new approaches to limit malfunctioning behaviors (for example using new forms of emotional communication and cooperation); (ii) a support to the diagnosis of impairments in the social functions, by means of the identification of pathological neural cognitive processes associated to an unsuccessful evolvement of social relationships; (iii) an objective measurement and identification of predictive factors of a therapy's outcome directly in the brain; (iv) the identification of clinical salient events in a treatment crucial for the success of the therapy; (v) an advancement in clinical treatments for autism and other alterations of the social functions through the monitoring of the clinical relationship between a patient and his/her therapist during a clinical intervention (psychotherapy or rehabilitative treatment).
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