The Shape Bias in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Potential Sources of Individual Differences.

Purpose: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate many mechanisms of lexical acquisition that support language in typical development; however, 1 notable exception is the shape bias. The bases of these children's difficulties with the shape bias are not well understood, and the current study explored potential sources of individual differences from the perspectives of both attentional and conceptual accounts of the shape bias. Method: Shape bias performance from the dataset of Potrzeba, Fein, and Naigles (2015) was analyzed, including 33 children with typical development (M = 20 months; SD = 1.6), 15 children with ASD with high verbal abilities (M = 33 months; SD = 4.6), and 14 children with ASD with low verbal abilities (M = 33 months; SD = 6.6). Lexical predictors (shape-side noun percentage from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory; Fenson et al., 2007) and social-pragmatic predictors (joint attention duration during play sessions) were considered as predictors of subsequent shape bias performance. Results: For children in the low verbal ASD group, initiation of joint attention (positively) and passive attention (negatively) predicted subsequent shape bias performance, controlling for initial language and developmental level. Proportion of child's known nouns with shape-defined properties correlated negatively with shape bias performance in the high verbal ASD group but did not reach significance in regression models. Conclusions: These findings suggest that no single account sufficiently explains the observed individual differences in shape bias performance in children with ASD. Nonetheless, these findings break new ground in highlighting the role of social communicative interactions as integral to understanding specific language outcomes (i.e., the shape bias) in children with ASD, especially those with low verbal abilities, and point to new hypotheses concerning the linguistic content of these interactions. Presentation Video: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7299581.

Effects of the polymeric niche on neural stem cell characteristics during primary culturing.

The polymeric niche encountered by cells during primary culturing can affect cell fate. However, most cell types are primarily propagated on polystyrene (PS). A cell type specific screening for optimal primary culture polymers particularly for regenerative approaches seems inevitable. The effect of physical and chemical properties of treated (corona, oxygen/nitrogen plasma) and untreated cyclic olefin polymer (COP), polymethymethacrylate (PMMA), PP, PLA, PS, PC on neuronal stem cell characteristics was analyzed. Our comprehensive approach revealed plasma treated COP and PMMA as optimal polymers for primary neuronal stem cell culturing and propagation. An increase in the number of NT2/D1 cells with pronounced adhesion, metabolic activities and augmented expression of neural precursor markers was associated to the plasma treatment of surfaces of COP and PMMA with nitrogen or oxygen, respectively. A shift towards large cell sizes at stable surface area/volume ratios that might promote the observed increase in metabolic activities and distinct modulations in F-actin arrangements seem to be primarily mediated by the plasma treatment of surfaces. These results indicate that the polymeric niche has a distinct impact on various cell characteristics. The selection of distinct polymers and the controlled design of an optimized polymer microenvironment might thereby be an effective tool to promote essential cell characteristics for subsequent approaches.

Transient preferences for repetitive visual stimuli in human infancy.

Sudden events and sharp discontinuities in the external world act as powerful attention attractors in adult humans. Does this reflex-like orienting towards targets deviating from their surround occur in early infancy? Here, we present evidence that, during the first months of life, infants orient preferentially towards repetitive visual patterns, rather than towards uniquely deviating targets. At 3-4 years of age, toddlers show an adult-like pattern of preferences. The transition from the infantile to the adult-like preferences occurs after the end of the first year of age. This development is parallelled by the emergence of novel neural and cognitive mechanisms. These maturational events might reflect the remodeling of the human brain during the transition from infancy to toddlerhood.