A Social Turn-Taking, Parent Mediated Learning Intervention for a Young Child with Autism: Findings of a Pilot Telehealth Study.

Social turn taking, a preverbal social communication competency often difficult for young children with autism, may be foundational to joint attention when included as a component of interventions for children with autism. In this study, social turn-taking was promoted through a parent mediated learning approach to intervention in a telehealth setting. Following a mixed-methods design, the present study explored the results of this new intervention model for a toddler with autism. The study also sought to understand any changes in the parent-child relationship because of the intervention. Findings indicate that the intervention supported the child's social communication competencies, including social turn-taking, joint attention, and facial focusing. Qualitative data revealed improvements in the parent-child relationship. These preliminary results lend support for promoting social turn-taking in interventions for children with autism, as well as for following developmental, parent-driven approaches to intervention. Studies with larger sample sizes are needed to understand these findings further. Implications for practice and research in early intervention are presented.

Differential involvement of cholinergic and beta-adrenergic systems during acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval of long-term memory of social and neutral odors.

Acetylcholine and norepinephrine have been implicated during different kinds of social recognition that involves olfactory memory formation. For example, blockade of muscarinic and beta-adrenergic receptors has been shown to impair short-term memory of both socially relevant as well as of neutral odors. However, previous studies have not explicitly compared the role of cholinergic and adrenergic modulation in long-term memory for socially relevant odor vs. incidental odor stimuli. In this work, we studied the function of muscarinic and beta-adrenergic receptors during acquisition and/or consolidation of a novel odor and during the retrieval of a familiar odor. The effects of systemic injections of scopolamine and propranolol, before and after presentation of estrous urine odor or mint odor, were evaluated by a long-term odor habituation task. The results demonstrated that scopolamine disrupts memory acquisition and/or consolidation of mint odor, and did not have any effect during retrieval of mint odor memory. Conversely, scopolamine disrupts memory consolidation and retrieval of estrous odor, depending on the dose applied. Propranolol injections have no effect on acquisition or consolidation for mint or estrous odor, but disrupt memory retrieval of familiar odor regarding their social/sexual or neutral content. These results demonstrate that muscarinic receptors are required differentially during long-term odor memory formation and for familiar odor recognition depending on the socially relevant content of the stimulus. Furthermore, the beta-adrenergic system could play an important role in memory recognition for familiar odors, regardless of the sexual/social or neutral content of the stimuli.