News and Notes about Scientific Research on Autism and other Developmental and Behavioral Disorders

NIH Collaborative Programs of Excellence in Autism Produce Important Research Findings


In 1997 the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) established a network of research projects investigating the genetics, underlying brain mechanisms, and developmental course of autism – the Collaborative Programs of Excellence in Autism (CPEA). Research teams at 10 different universities and medical centers are each studying particular aspects of autism, but all CPEA projects are using some common protocols and are sharing data with one another. The overall aim of this collaboration is to accelerate progress toward identifying the underlying causes of autism, and toward a more complete understanding of the complex ways in which autism affects behavior.

One of the CPEA research projects is based at the E.K. Shriver Center for Mental Retardation in Waltham, now part of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. This project is directed by Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD, and Susan Folstein, MD. Its main focus is on language and communication impairments, but component projects are also exploring the genetic, brain, and behavioral aspects of autism. The New England Center for Children, which has long served as a research site for the Psychological Sciences Division of the Shriver Center, is participating in the Shriver Center autism research project as well. Dr. Gina Green, the NECC Director of Research, directs a project at NECC entitled “Behavior Analytic Assessment of Cognition in Autism: A Search for Specificity of Deficit.” The main objective of this project is to develop and validate a computer-based battery of nonverbal tasks for individuals with substantial learning and communication difficulties who do and do not have autism. The battery is being used to evaluate whether there are learning characteristics that are unique and specific to autism, as opposed to general developmental delay (such as better visual than auditory learning, atypical generalization, behavioral rigidity, and symbolic learning difficulties).


Recently, investigators from all of the CPEA projects met in Denver to share results and plan further studies. Scientists from five sites are searching at least six different chromosomes for clues about the genetic basis of autism. Some are studying factors that might influence the role that genes play in early brain development. A great deal of research remains to be done on these important topics. Brain imaging studies are being conducted at a number of sites to try to determine if brain structures and functioning are atypical in individuals with autism who have relatively well-developed cognitive and language skills. Parallel behavioral studies are also underway. For example, researchers at Yale and UCLA found that when typical adults looked at photos of faces or at emotionally laden stimuli, certain parts of their brains were activated. That did not occur in many adults with autism; instead, their brains seemed to “process” these stimuli much as they did nonsocial stimuli, such as objects. Interestingly, behavioral studies at the University of Washington have shown that children with autism fail to orient to social stimuli, such as faces and their mother’s speech, at a very early age; in fact, some prefer nonsocial stimuli. Other research has shown that what children experience early in life shapes brain development, so the finding that many young children with autism do not attend to faces, for example, likely means that certain areas of their brains are not stimulated to develop normally. This finding also has clear implications for early intervention with these children.

Investigators at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine reported at the CPEA meeting that high-functioning children with autism did not differ from their typically developing peers on tests of the peripheral auditory system (hearing acuity, reflex thresholds, auditory brainstem responses). Certain brain responses to auditory stimuli were different in children with autism, however. Preliminary data from Dr. Green’s study at NECC show that most children with autism and severe language and learning difficulties readily learned to indicate that some auditory stimuli differed from others when that was trained directly, but when presented with auditory stimuli that varied slightly from the trained ones, the children tended to respond to all stimuli as if they were the same. These results suggest a need for closer examination of the auditory cortex in autism. In a similar vein, researchers from the Western Psychiatric Institute in Pittsburgh found that high-functioning individuals with autism showed less activation than normal in a language area of the brain when they were given sentence comprehension tasks, and less connectivity between that part of the brain and another region involved in spatial perception. An exciting finding, however, was that two adults with aphasia (caused by strokes that occurred several years prior) had increased functional connectivity between those same parts of the brain following intensive behavioral therapy designed to improve sentence comprehension skills.

Congress Passes Children’s Health Act

The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives recently passed H.R. 4365, the Children’s Health Act of 2000. The bill establishes a Pediatric Research Initiative within the National Institutes of Health to support research on children’s health, with a focus on maternal and infant care. It also authorizes funding for new educational and research programs for disorders including autism and other developmental disabilities, birth defects, and brain injuries. Under one provision of the bill, Centers of Excellence would be established to conduct basic and clinical research on autism. The legislation now awaits signing by President Clinton.

Some Data from The New England Center


The first edition of this newsletter outlined general topic areas in which New England Center staff are conducting research and program evaluation projects. From time to time we will feature specific projects, like the one summarized here.

Moore, T. R., & White, D. A. (August 2000) The effects of group instruction on student behavior and instructor behavior. Presented at the World Congress of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual Disabilities, Seattle, WA.

Often students in educational programs that use applied behavior analysis techniques receive direct instruction in a one-to-one format (i.e., one teacher, one student). Research has shown that this type of instruction can be very effective. Sometimes, however, students are instructed in groups, where teachers provide instructional opportunities (or “trials”) to one student at a time, in a format we refer to as alternating individual instruction. In a situation like that, some students have difficulty waiting while the teacher instructs the other student or students in the group, and they may act out. Teachers may also provide more attention (more instructional cues, more reinforcement) to students that demand it, inadvertently reducing the number of learning opportunities provided to the other students. A group instruction format, in which all students in the group are given similar instructions at the same time and group participation is reinforced, is one alternative to alternating individual instruction.

In this evaluation, we compared how often students with severe disabilities were engaged in learning activities and in interfering behavior, and how teachers distributed instructions and reinforcement among students in the group, under the group instruction and alternating individual instruction formats. We found that during group instruction, as compared to alternating individual instruction, students were more engaged in activities, and exhibited less interfering behavior overall. Teachers also distributed both instructional cues and reinforcement more evenly among the students during group instruction. We could not determine from our data which parts of the group instruction format were responsible for the enhanced student and teacher performances, but through further research this should become clearer.

U.S. Surgeon General Reviews Research on Autism Treatment

In December 1999, U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, MD, published a report on mental health. Chapter 3 was devoted to mental disorders in children and adolescents. The section of that chapter dealing with autism treatment included the following statements:

…the goal of treatment is to promote the child’s social and language
development and minimize behaviors that interfere with the child’s
functioning and learning. Intensive, sustained special education
programs and behavior therapy early in life can increase the ability of
the child with autism to acquire language and ability to learn. Special
education programs in highly structured environments appear to help
the child acquire self-care, social, and job skills. Only in the past
decade have studies shown positive outcomes for very young children
with autism. Given the severity of the impairment, high intensity of
service needs, and costs (both human and financial), there has been
an ongoing search for effective treatment.

Thirty years of research demonstrated the efficacy of applied
behavioral methods in reducing inappropriate behavior and
in increasing communication, learning, and appropriate social
behavior…

The full text of the autism section of the Surgeon General’s report can be found at www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/mentalhealth/chapter3/sec6.html#autism.

Web Resources

For information about applied behavior analysis in the treatment for autism visit www.behavior.org.

For science-based information on biomedical treatments and theories in autism visit www.autism-biomed.org.

For professionally screened information on health care (including some treatments for autism and other developmental disabilities), visit www.quackwatch.com.



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