18-Month Visit: SOCIAL-BEHAVIORAL & NEURAL

Social Referencing Protocol: The purpose of this assessment is to understand how infants use the facial expressions of adults to determine how to act in novel situations, and which part of the brain is involved. More specifically, we want to know if such behaviors and related brain activity differ significantly between children who are at increased risk for developing autism and control children.

In the first part of this assessment, you will play with your child in a playroom while novel toys are introduced. You will be asked to pretend to be excited and positive about some of the toys, neutral about others, and negative about yet others. We will coach you on how to make these positive and negative expressions before the toys are introduced to your child.

ERP Session: After your child has seen all of the toys, we will go into a different room and measure your child's brain activity in response to toys to which you pretended to behave positively and negatively. We measure your child's brain activity in a somewhat different way than we did at 10-months; here, we use a stretchy-knit cap (pictured above) instead of a net. The cap is made of mesh and has 32 sewn-in plastic disks, each of which is filled with a non-toxic, salt-based conductive gel after the cap has been placed on your child's head. These non-invasive electrodes measure the electricity that your child's brain generates as s/he looks at pictures of the toys s/he recently encountered. As in the 10-month ERP assessment, this procedure is considered risk-free--except for possible scalp irritation, gooeyness, and general annoyance with the cap, all of which we attempt to alleviate with fun distractions and wet washcloths.

Visits Requested: 1; for 2 hours

Location: The Infant Vision Lab at UCSD, La Jolla (Applied Math & Physics Bldg., 1st Floor)