Language & Cognition seminar - Prof Bhismadev Chakrabarti

Studying autism in and outside the lab: A phenotypic perspective

Autism Spectrum Conditions are behaviourally defined, which highlights the need to focus on the behavioural phenotype. Many autistic people experience challenges in social-communicative behaviour. A theoretical account suggests that differential response to social rewards contributes to such challenges. In our lab, we developed and tested different paradigms to measure response to social rewards in autistic and non-autistic individuals. Our results highlight the importance of stimulus time and task characteristics in shaping group differences. This work, like the majority of autism research worldwide, takes place within a “WEIRD” setting. Moving beyond this setting in another strand of our research, we validated tools and studied the autistic phenotype in >11000 Indian schoolchildren. This set of studies not only allowed us to build an autism research toolkit in India, but also provided insights into the impact of socio-linguistic factors on the manifestation of autism. The final strand of our ongoing research connects the research within and outside the laboratory through the development of a scalable mobile app for digital assessments of the autistic phenotype.