(Please confirm all info with the
college directly prior to participating)
My name is Julia Kim and I am a senior
Psychology major at Middlebury College. I am writing you in interest of your
support group for parents of Autistic children. I have piloted a novel study, my
honors thesis work, at the college on children with Autism and would like to
invite you and your group members to participate. It is a very exciting project that has
inspired me to generate more Autism awareness within the college community and
may serve as a potential intervention for Autistic individuals in the
future. I have extensive experience
working with children on the spectrum and am highly passionate about working
with them. I hope to use my thesis as a springboard to making a difference for
the Autistic community because they really do inspire me.
The study itself requires children ages 5-17
(both children on the spectrum and not on the spectrum), to sit and view a
series of 30 pictures of faces presented on a computer. There is no risk or
intrusive features to this study. I will be collecting eye tracking patterns to
the faces via eye tracking technology while the participants merely look at the
faces. The inspiration behind the study comes from various findings I have come
across and have integrated for the purposes of my study.
1.
Autistic individuals attend to the mouth
region first chiefly and then the upper eye region (in an inverted manner
comparative to typically developing individuals) – which is a marker of the
social impairment that is at the core of the disorder as this disrupted pattern
interferes with their inability to read and process various emotions and facial
cues.
2.
Autistic individuals, however, can attend to
and read faces of CARTOONS without this inversion identical to the ways in which
typically developing individuals do, attending to the eye region more than the
mouth.
Therefore, I have generated a hybrid/anamorphic crossovers between
human and cartoon faces to test whether Autistic individuals can process these
faces as typically developing individuals do, which may present results
indicating that somehow the way in which Autistic individuals attend to faces
may be scaffolded by an intervention of this nature over time i.e., via a
computer software game in schools (hypothetically)
The experiment will take less than 30 minutes and participants will
be reimbursed $15 for their time, which may be donated to a research
organization or support group for Autism if elected to do so. A parental figure is asked to be present
during the time of the study. All
individuals ages 5-17 on the spectrum (asperger’s, autism, PDD-NOS, etc) are
invited to participate, and individuals not on the spectrum in this age range
are invited to participate as well.
The experiment sessions will run in the months of February-April but
early sign ups are greatly encouraged as this is a pilot study.
That is the basic premise of my study and if you are interested or
have any questions, this is my contact information:
Julia Kim
jhkim@middlebury.edu
(201)724-5537