He also hopes to sidestep a confounding factor common to autism research. In this experiment, he hopes to find links between social and nonsocial theories and between behavioral and physiological data. "We each have our individual pet theories, and we each - me included - have designed experiments within these narrow theoretical apertures to confirm or refute hypotheses that are stated along our single tracks." "Autism has been characterized as a fundamental perceptual abnormality it's been characterized as a fundamental attentional abnormality it's been characterized as a failure of theory-of-mind," he said. Unlike much of the current research on autism, which isolates and tests a single domain, Belmonte designed the user-friendly video games with embedded tasks that test users - children with autism or Asperger syndrome ages 10 to 15, along with their unaffected siblings - across multiple domains. Development of the video game suite, called Astropolis, was supported in part by a grant from Autism Speaks. Matthew Belmonte, assistant professor of human development and a 2009 recipient of the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development Award, is using a novel tool - a suite of science-fiction-themed video games he developed with collaborators in computer sciences - to find order behind the range of autism's manifestations.īelmonte's NSF Early Career award, of $700,000 over five years, is funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). One of the hallmarks of autism is a need to find order, or to try to create it, in a world that can often seem chaotic and disorganized.īut for researchers trying to understand the disorder, which can affect perception, cognition, social and motor skills, communication and other domains, autism itself can seem incoherent and enigmatic.
0 kommentar(er)
