ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY OF SEMANTIC AND EMOTIONAL PROCESSING IN CHILDREN WITH PERVASIVE DEVELOPMENT DISORDER DURING MATERNAL INTERACTION TASKS

Abstract

Patients with autism spectrum disorder present significant language development and processing deficits as well as damaged processing and interpretation of emotions which interferes in their social interactions. Few studies combined the use of electroencephalographic register with tasks investigating how patients with autism process semantics in objects, facial expression and prosody, those are even more lacked when considering the age range from 2 to 6 years old. Furthermore, the studies described to the moment use facial or object exposure outside of a social interaction context. Thus, I present this PhD project which has as main goal comprehend the underlying electrophysiological mechanisms during tasks of semantic processing of objects, emotional expressions and facial expression and prosody integration considering maternal and unknown person interactions. Also, we will compare the results of children with pervasive developmental disorders with a control group of children with typical development. The obtained results may explicit the electrophysiological markers in early ages that are present in semantic processing tasks, thus evaluating possible differences and similarities between the groups, contributing for the comprehension on how the information processing with and without emotional content occurs, in addition to evaluate the effects of familiarity in this context and thus increasing the knowledge on the maternal influences over the social and cognitive development of children with autism.