Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Adults who lived high-stress childhoods have trouble reading the signs that a loss or punishment is looming, leaving themselves in situations that risk avoidable health and financial problems and legal trouble.
Objectives: To describe the association between indicators of SES and the prevalence of ASD in the United States during the period 2002 to 2010, when overall ASD prevalence among children more than doubled, and to determine whether SES disparities account for ongoing racial and ethnic disparities in ASD prevalence.
Weak central coherence (processing details over gist), poor oral language abilities, poor suppression, semantic interference, and poor comprehension monitoring have all been implicated to affect reading comprehension in individuals with ASD.
“We think this video game-based training could be a unique way to help individuals with ASD who have challenges with their balance address these issues,” says Travers, an investigator at UW–Madison’s Waisman Center and an assistant professor of kinesiology.
A decade after scientists announced the development of induced pluripotent stem cells, Waisman investigators, including Su-Chun Zhang and David Gamm, continue to use these cells to research and develop potential therapies for several disorders and conditions, such as ALS, Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, and macular degeneration.
How did you get into your field of research? After I learned that the inner ear can produce sounds on its own and that the brain controls what we hear, I was hooked!
Currently there are few evidence-based programs available for families of individuals with ASD during the transition to adulthood. The present study provided a preliminary evaluation of a multi-family group psychoeducation intervention using a randomized waitlist control design (n = 41).
“We found that the folks with cerebellar damage responded to these unpredictable changes to a larger extent than those without any damage,” says Parrell. “It was totally unexpected.”
Empathy, the ability to understand others' emotions, can occur through perspective taking and experience sharing. Neural systems active when adults empathize include regions underlying perspective taking (e.g. medial prefrontal cortex; MPFC), and experience sharing (e.g. inferior parietal lobule; IPL).
Hormones present in hair provide summative information about endocrine activity while the hair was growing. Therefore, it can be collected from an infant after birth and still provide retrospective information about hormone exposure during prenatal development.
