These are some of the research projects that you could get involved in.

The Perception of Animacy and Biological Motion

How do people know whether an object is alive? We study the motion cues of animacy, asking what cues people use to perceive that something is animate. We have found that speed matters, but perceived speed matters more (Szego & Rutherford, in prep). Perceiving animate objects may be one of the earliest forms of social development, and we are interested in when and how this skill develops in typical children, and in those with autism. Evidence in our lab suggests that children with autism do not find animacy detection as easy and automatic as typically developing children do, but that they can learn to distinguish motion cues of animacy (Rutherford, Pennington and Rogers, 2006). We use point-light walker stimuli to test whether people with autism can perceive simple actions based on these rudimentary cues to biological motion cues.

The Perception of Emotional Facial Expressions

How do people with and without autism perceive emotional facial expressions? We now know that people with autism use a more rule-based strategy for emotion perception, rather than the template based strategy that others use (Rutherford and McIntosh, 2006). Some people have suggested that those with autism don’t use visual information from the eyes, but will use the mouth preferentially. We have found evidence that people with autism use the eyes like typical people do, using simple discrimination (Rutherford, Clements and Sekuler, 2007), configural processing (Nishimura, Rutherford and Maurer, in prep) and eye-tracking (Rutherford and Towns, in prep).

The Categorization and Function of Emotions

We take an evolutionary and functional approach to the study of emotion perception. We want to know what categories of emotions people have, whether these categories are the same in autism, and what the relationship between the categories is. We know from our recent research that people with autism do have emotion categories (Homer and Rutherford, 2004). We also know that in typical adults, the relationship between the emotion categories is predicted by their function (Rutherford and Chattha, 2005). Recent work has shown that various methods, including the Visual Expectation Paradigm, can be used to reveal stable and reliable category boundaries (Cheal & Rutherford, in prep).

Attention and Eye Direction

There is evidence that eye gaze is a reliable and automatic cue to attention, at least in typical populations. Does this hold true in autism? We were able to design a method that dissociates eye movement from terminal eye direction. Which will capture attention in a person with autism, the direction of motion, or the direction the eyes appear to look? The eyes have it! (Rutheford and Krysko, in prep). Research in our lab also reveals an interesting interaction with emotions: some emotional facial expressions are able to direct attention, even in those with autism (Nash and Rutherford, 2004). We continue to explore the relationship between perceived emotions and attention, as well as between felt emotions and attention.

Early Detection of Autism

One prominent question in autism research is what are the very early signs of autism. We know that early diagnosis and early treatment lead to improved prognosis. In an ongoing, longitudinal project, we are recruiting and testing very young siblings of children with autism in order to see whether early social perception can be used to predict a later diagnosis of autism. We closely observe from birth children who are at risk for autism with the aim of detecting the very earliest correlates of a later autism diagnosis. This has obvious clinical applications as well as having the potential to answer important theoretical questions.

Brain Response to Emotional and Social Stimuli

Using Diffuse Optical Tomography, we can measure brain activity in adults and children. We use this to measure the brain’s reaction to social and emotional stimuli. This can tell us what parts of the brain are responsive in those with and without autism, so that we can compare these two groups. We can also use this technology to test whether different people’s brains categorize emotions the same way, and respond similarly to emotionally provocative scenarios.

Adaptive Changes in Social Perception during Pregnancy

Past research has shown that there may be a decline in IQ during pregnancy, driven by a decline in short-term memory. But are there any functional, adaptive changes that take place in our cognition during pregnancy? We are testing whether those who are pregnant are better as some aspects of face perception, faster at spotting a menacing face among pleasant faces, and more cautious about taking social and non-social risks.