According to CDC (Center for Disease control and prevention) there are more than 75000000 people in the world experiencing the autism disorder. It is worth to mention that autism is not an illness and people struggling from it are not considered to be sick or impaired.
NHS claims that autism is a spectrum, which means that it is different for everybody. However, there are some commonly spread “symptoms” of it:
- hard to communicate and interact with other people
- hard to understand how others think and feel
- bright lights or loud noises might be overwhelming
- get anxious about social events
- take longer to understand situation
It is unclear why, but autistic people are not perceiving emotions like they normally should – they can’t tell whether others are happy or sad, calm or mad. However, new research published in The Journal of Neuroscience, and Kohitij War (research scientist in MIT lab) are on the way to a solution.
There was an experiment provided, where images of different faces where shown to autistic adults and to neurotypical controls. Participants should have quickly decide whether the expression on the face is happiness or not. it turned out, that autistic adults should have seen faces with higher level of happiness to detect them properly.
There were interesting functions implied though:
- The scientists could dissect the network , measuring how well the network matched the results of autistic adults. the last network layer somehow mimic IT cortex (infernal temporal cortex, part of the brain, playing important role for visual recognition)
- Network can select images that might be more efficient in autism diagnoses. It can be used in clinics to detect autistic behavioral traits.
This is just the beginning of a long route to discover the causes of autistic disorder but MIT scientists think that they can select/generate diagnostic content , generate educational/movie content that engages autistic people.
I believe that it is an exciting project and topic to dive in, since autistic people are still not well accepted by the society, even though there is a strong culture of tolerance popular nowadays. They deserve to be understood, accepted and to get any help we can provide them with.
References:
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/autism/what-is-autism/
https://news.mit.edu/2022/artificial-neural-networks-model-face-processing-in-autism-0616