My group’s research addresses a fundamental challenge in ASD: how to map complex behavioral constructs, such as social communication deficits, onto mechanistic processes in the brain. We primarily target low-level (and particularly non-social) cognitive processes, such as working memory and auditory processing, that may not be specific to the ASD diagnosis, but that can be linked to genetic, neurophysiological or neuroanatomical domains, and that impact socio-communicative behavior. The aim is to better understand the pathology of ASD by linking research at the molecular level (genetics), at the neurofunctional level (brain imaging), and at the behavioral level (symptomatology). We aim to connect complex behaviors to underlying genetic mechanisms. 

Adam Naples, PhD, is Associate Research Scientist in the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine. As a researcher at Yale he has co-authored papers on autism, reading disability and genetics and developed novel experimental methods for studying brain activity during live and simulated social interactions. Dr. Naples received his A.B from Cornell University, his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University, and post-doctoral training at the Yale Child Study Center. He has also been active in the mentoring and training of graduate and undergraduate students and post-doctoral fellows. His primary research interests are understanding the neural and cognitive mechanisms that lead to variability in developmental disorders.

Dr. Tenenbaum is a psychologist and researcher who specializes in language acquisition and cognitive development. Her research and clinical interests focus on communication between children and their caregivers in the context of atypical development.

Dr. Tenenbaum uses eye tracking and other behavioral measures to study typical and atypical trajectories of social attention and language learning. Her work has focused on relations between social attention and word learning, communicative capacity in minimally verbal children with autism, and audio-visual synchrony processing in children with autism. Dr. Tenenbaum has also worked on questions of infant mental health and perinatal depression as it relates to language and cognitive development.

Dr. Tenenbaum completed her PhD in Psychology at Brown University in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences. She then respecialized in Clinical Psychology at Suffolk University and completed her internship and postdoctoral training at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University.

Dr. Tenenbaum joined the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development in September of 2018.