Human Development 674

Human Development 674:

Autism Spectrum Conditions

Cornell University

fall 2008

3 credits

PREREQUISITES: Permission of instructor.

MEETING TIME AND PLACE: TBA (one three-hour meeting per week)

OFFICE HOURS: MVR G62A (607.255.6385), Thursdays 10.35-11.35 and by appointment. To make an appointment or to discuss anything about the course, please speak with me in person or by telephone. Do not send email.

URL: http://www.mattababy.org/~belmonte/Teaching/HD674/

MAILING LIST: hd674 at mit.edu

DESCRIPTION: This graduate seminar emphasises research methodologies and the development of research proposals addressing the neuroscience of autism and other neurobiologically based developmental disorders. Topics will be selected on the basis of students' research objectives and on the basis of the experimental methods used to achieve these objectives. Techniques discussed may include functional magnetic resonance imaging, MRI morphometry, quantitative electroencephalography and event-related potentials, behaviour and psychophysics, computational modelling, and diagnostic and psychometric testing.

The course will commence with a discussion of participants' research interests and topics, and an overview of diagnostic criteria and other symptoms of autism spectrum conditions. Subsequent sessions will cover the Autism Diagnostic Interview – Revised, the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule – Generic, and the Broader Phenotype Autism Symptom Scale. Subsequent discussions will provide an overview of experimental design and anatomical and physiological measurement techniques applicable to human cognitive neuroscience, including MRI, fMRI, PET, EEG and MEG.

The following reference texts will be useful for methodological discussions. Books will be placed on reserve at Mann Library:

Rick B Buxton. Introduction to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Principles and Techniques. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2002). Mann (on order) RC386.6 M34 B895 2002

Roberto Cabeza & Alan Kingstone. Handbook of Functional Neuroimaging of Cognition 2/e. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press (2005). Mann QP360.5 H36 2005

Steve J Luck. An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press (2005). Mann (on order) QP376.5 L83 2005

Scott Makeig, Stefan Debener, Julie Onton, Arnaud Delorme. Mining event-related brain dynamics. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8(5):204-210 (2004). http://www.sccn.ucsd.edu/~scott/pdf/TICS04_Preprint.pdf

Paul L Nunez & Ramesh Srinivasan. Electric Fields of the Brain: the Neurophysics of EEG 2/e. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2006). Olin QP376.5 N86 2006 +

James V Stone, Independent Component Analysis: A Tutorial Introduction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press (2004). Engineering QA76.87 S78 2004

ASSIGNMENTS: One third of your mark will be based on oral participation, one third on the discussion that you lead, and one third on an open-book, open-notes, take-home final exam.

You are expected to participate fully in each week's discussion. This means reading each week's papers well in advance, and thinking critically about them. Are the hypotheses clearly enunciated? Do the methods address the hypotheses? Are the conclusions justified by the results, or what alternate interpretations might the results admit? How do the results compare and contrast with other findings and with theoretical contexts? Does the paper tell a story; does the writing cogently develop and resolve a specific research question? Looking for and finding these potential flaws in published work will help you to think critically about your own and your classmates' work, and to avoid such pitfalls.

You will lead one week's discussion, on three papers selected by you and germane to your own research interests and to the general theme of the course. You may want to choose one review article to provide theoretical background, one oft-cited research article to establish a particular theoretical viewpoint, and one current and contentious research article to provide opportunity for theoretical discussion. You are, however, free to choose (in consultation with the instructor) any three articles that well introduce and cover your topic. Leading discussion means exactly that: you should come prepared with background and overview to introduce and to structure your topic and its controversies, and with questions and points for the class to consider and to debate, but you should not plan a three-hour monologue.

The exam questions will be an opportunity for students to integrate topics presented during the term, and will focus especially on experimental design and methods.