Katarzyna Chawarska

• PhD
• Yale University

Background. Processing faces and speech is supported by the right-lateralized social visual perception pathway (social pathway) involving medial temporal/visual 5 area (MT/V5) and superior temporal sulcus (STS). Little is known about development of the social pathway and its links with later social outcomes. We examined intrinsic functional connect...

Social engagement and language are connected through early development. Alterations in their development can have a prolonged impact on children’s lives. However, the role of white matter at birth in this ongoing connection is less well-known. Here, we investigate how white matter at birth jointly supports social engagement and language outcomes in...

(Abstracted from Pediatrics 2024;154:e2023065297) Previous studies have shown that children with an older sibling diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) face a 7- to 14-fold higher risk of receiving an ASD diagnosis themselves. This information is valuable for clinicians and families, enabling earlier counseling, planning, and diagnostic sur...

Autism is a heterogeneous condition, and functional magnetic resonance imaging-based studies have advanced understanding of neurobiological correlates of autistic features. Nevertheless, little work has focused on the optimal brain states to reveal brain-phenotype relationships. In addition, there is a need to better understand the relevance of att...

Research on attention towards non‐social stimuli in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has increased over the past decade; however, findings have been inconsistent. It has been suggested that stimuli relating to common circumscribed interests (CIs) elicit more attention than non‐CI related stimuli. This meta‐analysis synthesizes resul...

Clinician and caregiver reports of autism features are both integral to receiving an autism diagnosis and appropriate intervention, yet informant discrepancies are present in clinical practice and may differ by demographic characteristics of the child and family. The present study examined how clinician–caregiver discrepancies in ratings of a child...

The social visual pathway, which diverges from the dorsal pathway at the visual motion area (MT/V5) and runs from posterior down to anterior portions of the superior temporal sulcus (STS), specializes in processing dynamic social information. This study examined resting-state functional connectivity within this pathway in children with autism spect...

OBJECTIVES Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is estimated to be ∼10 times higher in children with versus without an autistic sibling in population-based studies. Prospective studies of infant siblings have revealed even higher familial recurrence rates. In the current prospective longitudinal study, we provide updated estimates of familial ASD recurre...

The default mode (DMN), frontoparietal (FPN), and salience (SN) networks interact to support a range of behaviors, are vulnerable to environmental insults, and are disrupted in neurodevelopmental disorders. However, their development across the third trimester and perinatal transition remains unknown. Employing resting-state functional MRI at 30 to...

Younger siblings (SIBS) of children with autism exhibit a wide range of clinical and subclinical symptoms including social, cognitive, language, and adaptive functioning delays. Identifying factors linked with this phenotypic heterogeneity is essential for improving understanding of the underlying biology of the heterogenous outcomes and for early...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit externalizing problems, which have been linked with increased anxiety and depression, peer rejection, and parental stress. Identification of early predictors of externalizing behaviors in autism will facilitate identification of vulnerable children and implementation of early preventative i...

Studies utilizing eye‐tracking methods have potential to promptly capture real‐world dynamics of one of the core areas of vulnerability in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), selective social attention. So far, no studies have successfully reported utilizing the method to examine social attention in toddlers with neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities in...

The Selective Social Attention (SSA) task is a brief eye-tracking task involving experimental conditions varying along socio-communicative axes. Traditionally the SSA has been used to probe socially-specific attentional patterns in infants and toddlers who develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This current work extends these findings to preschool...

Cell differentiation involves shifts in chromatin organization allowing transcription factors (TFs) to bind enhancer elements and modulate gene expression. The TF-enhancer-gene regulatory interactions that control the formation of neuronal lineages have yet to be charted in humans. Here, we mapped enhancer elements and conducted an integrative anal...

Idiopathic autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is highly heterogeneous, and it remains unclear how convergent biological processes in affected individuals may give rise to symptoms. Here, using cortical organoids and single-cell transcriptomics, we modeled alterations in the forebrain development between boys with idiopathic ASD and their unaffected fat...

Children with autism spectrum disorder are prescribed various medications to address behavior and mood. In clinical trials, individuals taking concomitant psychotropic medications often are excluded to maintain homogeneity and prevent contamination of clinical endpoints. However, this choice may compromise the representativeness of the sample. In a...

Difficulty with attention is an important symptom in many conditions in psychiatry, including neurodiverse conditions such as autism. There is a need to better understand the neurobiological correlates of attention and leverage these findings in healthcare settings. Nevertheless, it remains unclear if it is possible to build dimensional predictive...

Altered resting state functional connectivity (FC) involving the anterior insula (aINS), a key node in the salience network, has been reported consistently in autism. Here we examined, for the first time, FC between the aINS and the whole brain in a sample of full-term, postmenstrual age (PMA) matched neonates (mean 44.0 weeks, SD = 1.5) who due to...

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is defined behaviorally, but measures that probe underlying neural mechanisms may provide clues to biomarker discovery and brain-based patient stratification with clinical utility. Phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) has been posited as a measure of the balance between top-down and bottom-up processing in corte...

Social cognition is critical to early learning. Functional imaging studies in adults and older children suggest the involvement of the default mode (DMN), executive control (ECN), and salience (SAL) networks in social cognition. These networks are vulnerable to environmental insults, and abnormalities of intra- and inter-network connectivity of the...

Objective: Numerous candidate EEG biomarkers have been put forward for use in clinical research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but biomarker development has been hindered by limited attention to the psychometric properties of derived variables, inconsistent results across small studies, and variable methodology. The authors evaluated the basic...

Difficulty with attention is an important symptom in many conditions in psychiatry, including neurodiverse conditions such as autism. There is a need to better understand the neurobiological correlates of attention and leverage these findings for individuals in healthcare settings. Nevertheless, it remains unclear if it is possible to build robust...

When designing and interpreting results from clinical trials evaluating treatments for children on the autism spectrum, a complicating factor is that most children receive a range of concurrent treatments. Thus, it is important to better understand the types and hours of interventions that participants typically receive as part of standard of care,...

While previous work has identified the early predictors of language skills in infants at elevated familial risk (ER) and low familial risk (LR) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), no studies to date have explored whether these predictors vary based on diagnostic outcome of ASD or no ASD. The present study used a large, multisite dataset to examine...

Recent proposals have suggested the potential for neural biomarkers to improve clinical trial processes in neurodevelopmental conditions; however, few efforts have identified whether chronological age-based adjustments will be necessary (as used in standardized behavioral assessments). Event-related potentials (ERPs) demonstrate early differences i...

Executive functioning (EF) deficits co‐occur frequently with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and have a long‐term detrimental impact on quality of life of children and their families. Timely identification of risk for EF vulnerabilities may hasten access to early intervention and alleviate their long‐term consequences. This study examines (1) if EF...

Autism is a heterogeneous neurodevelopmental condition, and fMRI-based studies have helped advance our understanding of its effects on brain network activity. We review how predictive modelling, employing measures of functional connectivity and symptoms, has helped reveal key insights into this condition. We discuss how different prediction framewo...

There is no clear genetic etiology or convergent pathophysiology for autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Using induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived brain organoids and single-cell transcriptomics, we modeled alterations in the formation of the forebrain between sons with ASD and their unaffected fathers in ten families. Relative to fathers, pr...

Background Due to familial liability, siblings of children with ASD exhibit elevated risk for language delays. The processes contributing to language delays in this population remain unclear. Methods Considering well‐established links between attention to dynamic audiovisual cues inherent in a speaker’s face and speech processing, we investigated...

Background Altered resting state functional connectivity (FC) involving the anterior insula (aINS), a key node in the salience network, has been reported consistently in autism. Method Here we examined, for the first time, FC between the aINS and the whole brain in a sample of full-term, postmenstrual age (PMA) matched neonates (mean 44.0 weeks, S...

Although the neural scaffolding for language is putatively present before birth, the maturation of functional connections among the key nodes of the language network, Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, is less known. We leveraged longitudinal and cross-sectional data from three sites collected through six studies to track the development of functional c...

The present study objectives were to examine the performance of the new M-CHAT-R algorithm to the original M-CHAT algorithm. The main purpose was to examine if the algorithmic changes increase identification of children later diagnosed with ASD, and to examine if there is a trade-off when changing algorithms. We included 54,463 screened cases from...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical connectivity lateralization of functional networks. However, previous studies have not directly investigated if differences in specialization between ASD and typically developing (TD) peers are present in infancy, leaving the timing of onset of these differences relatively unknown. We stud...

Diminished visual attention to faces of social partners represents one of the early characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we examine if the introduction of puppets as social partners alters attention to speakers' faces in young children with ASD and typically developing (TD) controls. Children with ASD (N = 37; Mage = 49.44 months...

Early identification of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is regarded as crucial for swift access to early intervention and, subsequently, better outcomes later in life. However, current instruments miss large proportions of children who later go on to be diagnosed with ASD, raising a question of what these instruments measure. The present study utili...

Performing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of children can be a difficult task, as participants tend to move while being scanned. Head motion represents a significant confound in fMRI connectivity analyses. One approach to limit motion has been to use shorter MRI protocols, though this reduces the reliability of results. Hence, t...

Differential emotional reactivity to social and nonsocial stimuli has been hypothesized but rarely examined empirically in ASD despite its potential importance for development of social motivation, cognition, and comorbid psychopathology. This study examined emotional reactivity, regulation, and attention to social and nonsocial threat in toddlers...

Past studies in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) indicate atypical peripheral physiological arousal. However, the conditions under which these atypicalities arise and their link with behavioral emotional expressions and core ASD symptoms remain uncertain. Given the importance of physiological arousal in affective, learning, and cognitive processes, t...

Importance Enhanced selective attention toward nonsocial objects and impaired attention to social stimuli constitute key clinical features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Yet, the mechanisms associated with atypical selective attention in ASD are poorly understood, which limits the development of more effective interventions. In typically develo...

Clinical research in neurodevelopmental disorders remains reliant upon clinician and caregiver measures. Limitations of these approaches indicate a need for objective, quantitative, and reliable biomarkers to advance clinical research. Extant research suggests the potential utility of multiple candidate biomarkers; however, effective application of...

Biomarker development is currently a high priority in neurodevelopmental disorder research. For many types of biomarkers (particularly biomarkers of diagnosis), reliability over short periods is critically important. In the field of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), resting electroencephalography (EEG) power spectral densities (PSD) are well-studied...

Background Performing fMRI scans of children can be a difficult task, as participants tend to move while being scanned. Head motion represents a significant confound in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) connectivity analyses, and methods to limit the impact of movement on data quality are needed. One approach has been to use shorter MRI...

The objective of the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT) is to evaluate a set of lab-based behavioral video tracking (VT), electroencephalography (EEG), and eye tracking (ET) measures for use in clinical trials with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Within the larger organizational structure of the ABC-CT, the Data...

Objective: Although some eye-tracking studies demonstrate atypical attention to faces by six months of age in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), behavioral studies in early infancy return largely negative results. We examined the effects of context and diagnosis on attention to faces during face-to-face live interactions in infants at high (HR) and l...

Clinical research in neurodevelopmental disorders remains reliant upon clinician and caregiver measures. Limitations of these approaches indicate a need for objective, quantitative, and reliable biomarkers to advance clinical research. Extant research suggests the potential utility of multiple candidate biomarkers; however, effective application of...

Biomarker development is currently a high priority in neurodevelopmental disorder research. For many types of biomarkers (particularly biomarkers of diagnosis), reliability over short time periods is critically important. In the field of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), resting electroencephalography (EEG) power spectral densities (PSD) are well-stu...

Importance Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with different genetic etiologies. Prospective examination of familial-risk infants informs understanding of developmental trajectories preceding ASD diagnosis, potentially improving early detection. Objective To compare outcomes and trajectories associated with...

Young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) look less toward faces compared to their non‐ASD peers, limiting access to social learning. Currently, no technologies directly target these core social attention difficulties. This study examines the feasibility of automated gaze modification training for improving attention to faces in 3‐year‐old...

Background Impaired attention to faces of interactive partners is a marker for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in early childhood. However, it is unclear whether children with ASD avoid faces or find them less salient and whether the phenomenon is linked with the presence of eye contact or speech. Methods We investigated the impacts of speech (SP)...

Objectives: To examine elevated neonatal inflammatory and neurotrophic proteins from children born extremely preterm in relation to later childhood brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging volumes and cognition. Study design: We measured circulating inflammation-related proteins and neurotrophic proteins on postnatal days 1, 7, and 14 in 166 children at...

Research has identified early appearing differences in gross and fine motor abilities in infants at heightened risk (HR) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) because they are the younger siblings of children with ASD, and it suggests that such differences may be especially apparent among those HR infants themselves eventually diagnosed with ASD. The...

This study investigated interactions between parents and 12-month-old infants at high (HR-SIBS; n = 27) and low (LR-SIBS; n = 14) familial risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The contributions of parental variables, as well as child’s autism symptom severity and verbal skills, to the parent interaction style were examined. Parents of HR-SIBS e...

Objective: There is a prevailing notion that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit intense negative and attenuated positive emotions, although the empirical evidence regarding their emotional expressiveness (EE) is limited. Given the importance of emotions in shaping social and cognitive development, we examined intensity and valenc...

Objectives: To test the hypothesis that higher blood levels of neurotrophic proteins (proteins that support neuronal survival and function) in the first 2 weeks of life are associated with a lower risk of cognitive impairment at 10 years. Study design: We evaluated 812 10-year-old children with neonatal blood specimens enrolled in the multicente...

OBJECTIVES We compared sex-stratified developmental and temperamental profiles at 18 months in children screening negative for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) on the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT) but later receiving diagnoses of ASD (false-negative group) versus those without later ASD diagnoses (true-negative group). METHODS W...

Background: Multiple eye-tracking studies have highlighted the "atypical" nature of social attention in autism. However, it is unclear how "atypical" or "typical" should be quantified. Methods: We developed a method for identifying moments when members of a group looked at similar places (High-Cohesion Time Frames; HCTFs). We defined typicality...

Given the emphasis on early screening for ASD, it is crucial to examine the concordance between parent report and clinician observation of autism-related behaviors. Similar items were compared from the First Year Inventory (Baranek et al. First-Year Inventory (FYI) 2.0. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2003), a parent screener for ASD, an...

The association of hand preference (left, mixed, and right) with cognitive, academic, motor, and behavioral function was evaluated in 864 extremely preterm children at 10 years of age. Left-handed and right-handed children performed similarly but mixed-handed children had greater odds of functional deficits across domains than right-handed children...

Objective One of the common findings in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is limited selective attention toward social objects such as faces. Evidence from both human and nonhuman primate studies suggests that selection of objects for processing is guided by the appraisal of object values. We hypothesized that impairments in selective attention in ASD...

Background: Although temperament has been recognized as an important contributor to childhood psychopathology, its role in emergent autism spectrum phenotypes is not well understood. This study examined whether toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display temperamental vulnerabilities compared to toddlers with other developmental challenge...

Objective: To assess the association between maternal prepregnancy body mass index and adequacy of pregnancy weight gain in relation to neurocognitive function in school-aged children born extremely preterm. Study design: Study participants were 535 ten-year-old children enrolled previously in the prospective multicenter Extremely Low Gestationa...

Sex differences in typical development can provide context for understanding ASD. Baron-Cohen (Trends Cogn Sci 6(6):248–254, 2002) suggested ASD could be considered an extreme expression of normal male, compared to female, phenotypic profiles. In this paper, sex-specific M-CHAT scores from N = 53,728 18-month-old toddlers, including n = 185 (32 fem...

Objective: To examine the predictive validity of the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT) administered at age 24 months for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosed at 10 years of age in a US cohort of 827 extremely low gestational age newborns (ELGANs) followed from birth. Study design: We examined the sensitivity, specificity, po...

This study characterized developmental outcomes of a large sample of siblings at familial high-risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who themselves did not have ASD (n = 859), and low-risk controls with no family history of ASD (n = 473). We characterized outcomes at age 3 years using a developmental assessment of language and learning and an obs...

Messinger et al. found a 3.18 odds ratio of male to female ASD recurrence in 1241 prospectively followed high-risk (HR) siblings. Among high-risk siblings (with and without ASD), as well as among 583 low-risk controls, girls exhibited higher performance on the Mullen Scales of Early Learning, as well as lower restricted and repetitive behavior seve...

This paper modifies the DBSCAN algorithm to identify fixations and saccades. This method combines advantages from dispersion-based algorithms, such as resilience to noise and intuitive fixational structure, and from velocity-based algorithms, such as the ability to deal appropriately with smooth pursuit (SP) movements.

This paper modifies the DBSCAN algorithm to identify fixations and saccades. This method combines advantages from dispersion-based algorithms, such as resilience to noise and intuitive fixational structure, and from velocity-based algorithms, such as the ability to deal appropriately with smooth pursuit (SP) movements.

Objective: The objectives of this review are to highlight the impact of the first decade of high-risk (HR) infant sibling work in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and to identify potential areas of translational focus for the next decade of research. Method: A group of clinicians and researchers in ASD working both inside and outside of the HR des...

This study examined the latent structure of spontaneous social attention in 11- to 26-month-olds with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 90) and typically developing (n = 79) controls. Application of the joint and individual variance explained decomposition technique revealed that attention was driven by a condition-independent tuning into the dyna...

Objective: Sexual dimorphism in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is a well-recognized but poorly understood phenomenon. Females are four times less likely to be diagnosed with ASD than males and, when diagnosed, are more likely to exhibit comorbid anxiety symptoms. One of the key phenotypic features of ASD is atypical attention to socially relevant...

Recent studies have suggested that skill acquisition rates for children with autism spectrum disorders receiving early interventions can be predicted by child motivation. We examined whether level of interest during an Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule assessment at 2 years predicts subsequent rates of verbal, nonverbal, and adaptive skill acq...

This research employs an expressive robot to elicit affective response in young children and explore correlations between autonomously-detected play, affective response and developmental ability. In this study, we introduce a new, affective interface that combines sound, color, movement and context to simulate the expression of emotions. Our approa...

Background Phenotypic heterogeneity among toddlers presenting with ASD symptoms complicates diagnostic considerations and limits our ability to predict long-term outcomes. To address this concern, we sought to identify more homogeneous subgroups within ASD based on toddlers’ clinical profiles in the second year of life, evaluating diagnostic stabil...

Aggregate factors of performance on child outcome measures, family resources, and community support were predictive of longitudinal expressive language outcomes in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a disorder of brain development. Most cases lack a clear etiology or genetic basis, and the difficulty of re-enacting human brain development has precluded understanding of ASD pathophysiology. Here we use three-dimensional neural cultures (organoids) derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to investiga...

Atypical looking behaviors in neuropsychiatric conditions such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are not only a reflection of inherently abnormal neuropsychological processes, but also suggest that future access to observational learning opportunities may be limited. The work presented in this paper uses interactive eye tracking as a first step to...

The increased male prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be mirrored by the early emergence of sex differences in ASD symptoms and cognitive functioning. The female protective effect hypothesis posits that ASD recurrence and symptoms will be higher among relatives of female probands. This study examined sex differences and sex of proband...

Background: The diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) made before age 3 has been found to be remarkably stable in clinic- and community-ascertained samples. The stability of an ASD diagnosis in prospectively ascertained samples of infants at risk for ASD due to familial factors has not yet been studied, however. The American Academy of Pedia...

Objective Younger siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at high risk (HR) for developing ASD as well as features of the broader autism phenotype. While this complicates early diagnostic considerations in this cohort, it also provides an opportunity to examine patterns of behavior associated specifically with ASD compared to o...

Objective Although early head and body overgrowth have been well-documented in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), their prevalence and significance remain unclear. It is also unclear whether overgrowth affects males and females differentially, and whether it is associated with clinical outcomes later in life. Method To evaluate prevalence of somatic...

This study examines whether parental report of social-communicative and repetitive behaviors at 12 months can be helpful in identifying autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in younger siblings of children with ASD [high-risk (HR)-siblings]. Parents of HR-siblings and infants without a family history of ASD completed the First Year Inventory at 12 months....

Background: Brain enlargement in infancy, recently reported to occur in association with an generalized overgrowth in physical stature, is one of the best-replicated biological findings in ASD. It is not clear whether generalized overgrowth is also present in girls, what its prevalence is, and whether it is associated with clinical outcomes in ch...

Background: The pineal hormone melatonin (MEL) is secreted with a marked day-night rhythm and it plays a crucial role in circadian rhythms. MEL also has powerful antioxidant properties. Studies in school-age children, adolescents and young adults have reported lower group mean production of melatonin in ASD. Objectives: We wished to examine dayti...

Background: Given the current emphasis on early screening for autism spectrum disorders (ASD), it is crucial to examine the efficacy of screening tools and understand the potential vulnerabilities associated with utilizing parent reports. Although parents have an optimal perspective from which to observe and engage with their infants across diverse...

Background: Eye-tracking is a prominent tool in psychological and cognitive research. However, the analysis of eye-tracking data is confounded by choices in how fixations should be defined, i.e. how densely packed points must be in order to be considered a fixation. Our previous work (Shic, Scassellati, & Chawarska, 2008), has shown that by manipul...

Background: Our previous work with eye tracking has shown that 20 month old toddlers with ASD monitor the activities of others to a lesser extent than both developmentally delayed and typically developing peers. However, it is unclear whether the gaze cues of others, the presence of distractors, or motion cues were responsible for the differences b...