Author: Inge-Marie Eigsti

Well done, Dr. Girolamo!!

Posted on by

Congrats to post-doctoral fellow Teresa Girolamo on her new position at San Diego State University, and her multiple recent publications:

Girolamo, T., Castro, N., Hendricks, A. E., Ghali, S., & Eigsti, I. M. (2022). Implementation of Open Science Practices in Communication Sciences and Disorders Research With Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_jslhr-22-00272

Girolamo, T., Parker, T., & Eigsti, I. M. (2022). Incorporating DisCrit theory to combat systematic exclusion of BIPOC in clinical neuroscience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.988092

Girolamo, T., Ghali, S., & Eigsti, I. M. (2023). A community-based approach to longitudinal language research with racially and ethnically minoritized autistic young adults: Lessons learned and new directions. American Journal of Speech and Language Pathology, 32(3), 977-988. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_ajslp-22-00341

Girolamo, T., Shen, L., Gulick, A., Rice, M. L., & Eigsti, I. M. (in press). Studies pertaining to language impairment in school-age autistic individuals underreport participant sociodemographics: A systematic review. Autism.

LVIS (the Low Verbal Investigatory Screener) is in the building!

Posted on by

We are delighted to share a new publication, describing the Low Verbal Investigatory Screener (LVIS).  We hope that this measure will prove useful to the broader community!

Naples*, Tenenbaum*,  Jones, Righi, Sheinkopf  & Eigsti (in press). Exploring communicative competence in autistic children who are minimally verbal: The Low Verbal Investigatory Survey for Autism (LVIS). Autism. *First and second author made equal contributions.

And learn more about the LVIS here:

eLow-Verbal Investigatory Survey (eLVIS) Project Home

New lab publication: Jaffe-Dax, S., & Eigsti, I. M. (in press). Perceptual inference is impaired in individuals with ASD and intact in individuals who have lost the autism diagnosis. Nature Scientific Reports.

Posted on by

Abstract. Beyond the symptoms which characterize their diagnoses, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced performance in simple perceptual discrimination tasks. Often attributed to superior sensory sensitivities, enhanced performance may also reflect a weaker bias towards previously perceived stimuli. This study probes perceptual inference in a group of individuals who have lost the autism diagnosis (LAD); that is, they were diagnosed with ASD in early childhood but have no current ASD symptoms. Groups of LAD, current ASD, and typically developing (TD) participants completed an auditory discrimination task. Individuals with TD showed a bias towards previously perceived stimuli—a perceptual process called “contraction bias”; that is, their representation of a given tone was contracted towards the preceding trial stimulus in a manner that is Bayesian optimal. Similarly, individuals in the LAD group showed a contraction bias. In contrast, individuals with current ASD showed a weaker contraction bias, suggesting reduced perceptual inferencing. These findings suggest that changes that characterize LAD extend beyond the social and communicative symptoms of ASD, impacting perceptual domains. Measuring perceptual processing earlier in development in ASD will tap the causality between changes in perceptual and symptomatological domains. Further, the characterization of perceptual inference could reveal meaningful individual differences in complex high-level behaviors.