John Welsh, PhD, University of Washington, Professor, Dept of Pediatrics

I will discuss our current work at the University of Washington Autism Center, carried out with my colleagues Drs. Annette Estes, Jeff Munson and Stephen Dager, pertaining to our use of classical eyeblink conditioning (EBC) for understanding developmental trajectories of children that have autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One challenge of ASD is its profound heterogeneity in intellectual development, making it difficult to predict how a child’s developmental trajectory will unfold at the time of earliest ASD diagnosis (approximately age 2 years). We have found that classical EBC, including both the trace and delay paradigms, can report alterations in associative learning and conditioned response timing that distinguish children having ASD with different trajectories of intellectual development, ranging from those that are high-functioning to those having profound, life-long intellectual disability. In that context, I will discuss our results in relation to structural brain imaging that provides clues regarding alterations in early cerebellar morphology as they relate to EBC phenotypes, intellectual development, and adaptive behaviors in children with ASD.