Sensory Phenotypes of Autism Spectrum Disorder Across Lifespan: Prospective Cohort Study and Sensory-Social Paradigm Establishment

Sensory disturbance of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are life-long highly-impairing challenges for the individual. Anxiety and fear around the sensory issues significantly threatens the psychological and mental health. As a newly introduced diagnostic criteria of ASD, sensory characteristics becomes a recent focus of ASD research. The ASD population is aging, how their sensory features naturally change with age is particular relevant for their adaptation. However, current literature are limited to childhood and young adults and mostly rely on behavioral report, lacking a clear whole picture of changing sensory phenotype in terms of different sensory modality and sensory domains. Besides, how sensory characteristics in ASD can be quantified by objective measures or explored by qualitative approach, how the sensory sensitivity contributes to the core social deficits in ASD such as eye gaze or social touch avoidance are unclear. This project plans to achieve the following aims:

1. Establish sensory phenotypes of a Taiwanese ASD cohort across lifespan, including variety of sensory modalities (i.e., visual, tactile, auditory, smell/taste, proprioception, etc.), sensory domains (i.e., low registration, sensory seeking, sensory sensitivity, and sensory avoiding), and clinical correlates.
2. Clarify the relationship between sensory phenotypes and social impairment by two specific sensory-social paradigms targeting eye gaze avoidance and social touch anxiety, which are hallmarks of ASD. Factors of emotion types as well as familiarity of faces or social/object touch will be manipulated to examine how they moderate eye tracking and pupil response.
3. Identify the atypical neural representation of ASD during eye gaze and viewing social touch by fMRI and EEG.