About the Project
Autism is a severe and lifelong developmental condition. Approximately 70% of autistic people frequently suffer from debilitating sensory symptoms; individuals may find innocuous environmental stimuli (e.g. quiet background noise) distressing or conversely, may seek out repetitive stimuli (e.g. eating food of only certain colours). Such symptoms can significantly affect quality of life, but the underlying mechanisms are not known and there are no effective therapies.
To make sense of our environment, information from different sensory modalities (vision, touch, audition) must be integrated appropriately. Recent work in our lab (Body Eyes and Movement; BEAM lab) has begun to test where autism affects multisensory processing. We found evidence that people with autism were most affected when they were required to selectively attend to one modality (touch) in the presence of distractors in another modality (vision; Poole et al., 2015) and preliminary evidence that attention to vision versus audition relates to self-reported sensory symptoms. This PhD project will build on this work by (1) exploring how the ability to attend selectively to a sensory modality maps onto everyday sensory symptoms in autism in a larger sample of adults with autism and whether sub-groups exist (2) using electroencephalography (EEG) to identify the neural mechanisms underlying these attentional changes.
The findings from this project are likely to increase our understanding of the mechanisms underlying sensory symptoms in autism, as well as lead to ideas for interventions (e.g. multisensory attentional training) to improve quality of life.
Body Eyes and Movement Lab: http://beamlab.lab.manchester.ac.uk/
Funding Notes
This project is to be funded under the MRC Doctoral Training Partnership. If you are interested in this project, please make direct contact with the Principal Supervisor to arrange to discuss the project further as soon as possible. You MUST also submit an online application form - full details on how to apply can be found on the MRC DTP website www.manchester.ac.uk/mrcdtpstudentships
Applications are invited from UK/EU nationals only. Applicants must have obtained, or be about to obtain, at least an upper second class honours degree (or equivalent) in a relevant subject.
References
Jachim S, Warren P, Mcloughlin N, Gowen E (2015) Collinear facilitation and contour integration in autism: evidence for atypical visual integration. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10;9:115
Poole D, Gowen E, Warren PA, Poliakoff E (2017) Which came first? Exploring crossmodal temporal order judgements and their relationship with sensory reactivity in autism and neurotypicals. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47, 215–223.
Poole D, Gowen E, Warren PA, Poliakoff E (2015) Investigating visual-tactile interactions over time and space in adults with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 45, 3316-3326.
Poole D, Couth S, Gowen E, Warren PA, Poliakoff E (2015) Adapting the crossmodal congruency task for measuring the limits of visual-tactile interactions within and between groups. Multisensory Research, 18, 227-244.
Taylor JR et al. (2017). The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) data repository: Functional and structural MRI, MEG, and cognitive data from a large cross-sectional lifespan sample. NeuroImage, 144, 262-269.
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