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An academic partnership between a university and an upstate New York school serving students with intellectual and developmental disabilities established a research-driven, weekly onsite asymptomatic COVID-19 testing protocol supplemented by symptomatic testing. The research team, including school leadership, met at least weekly to address implementation issues, impacts of changing pandemic and regulatory requirements, and interpretation and dissemination of findings. The dynamic partnership resulted in 380 participants, more than 16 000 polymerase chain reaction tests, and additional research studies. (Am J Public Health. 2024;114(S5):S384–S387. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307687) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This study examined the correlation of classroom ventilation (air exchanges per hour (ACH)) and exposure to CO2 ≥1,000 ppm with the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 over a 20-month period in a specialized school for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). These students were at a higher risk of respiratory infection from SARS-CoV-2 due to challenges in tolerating mitigation measures (e.g. masking). One in-school measure proposed to help mitigate the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection in schools is increased ventilation. Methods: We established a community-engaged research partnership between the University of Rochester and the Mary Cariola Center school for students with IDD. Ambient CO2 levels were measured in 100 school rooms, and air changes per hour (ACH) were calculated. The number of SARS-CoV-2 cases for each room was collected over 20 months. Results: 97% of rooms had an estimated ACH ≤4.0, with 7% having CO2 levels ≥2,000 ppm for up to 3 hours per school day. A statistically significant correlation was found between the time that a room had CO2 levels ≥1,000 ppm and SARS-CoV-2 PCR tests normalized to room occupancy, accounting for 43% of the variance. No statistically significant correlation was found for room ACH and per-room SARS-CoV-2 cases. Rooms with ventilation systems using MERV-13 filters had lower SARS-CoV-2-positive PCR counts. These findings led to ongoing efforts to upgrade the ventilation systems in this community-engaged research project. Conclusions: There was a statistically significant correlation between the total time of room CO2 concentrations ≥1,000 and SARS-CoV-2 cases in an IDD school. Merv-13 filters appear to decrease the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection. This research partnership identified areas for improving in-school ventilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perirhinal cortex is a brain area that has been considered crucial for the object recognition memory (ORM). However, with the use of an ORM enhancer named RGS14414 as gain‐in‐function tool, we show here that frontal association cortex and not the Perirhinal cortex is essential for the ORM of objects with complex features that consisted of detailed drawing on the object surface (complex ORM). An expression of RGS14414, in rat brain frontal association cortex, induced the formation of long‐term complex ORM, whereas the expression of the same memory enhancer in Perirhinal cortex failed to produce this effect. Instead, RGS14414 expression in Perirhinal cortex caused the formation of ORM of objects with simple features that consisted of the shape of object (simple ORM). Further, a selective elimination of frontal association cortex neurons by treatment with an immunotoxin Ox7‐SAP completely abrogated the formation of complex ORM. Thus, our results suggest that frontal association cortex plays a key role in processing of a high‐order recognition memory information in brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a list of acknowledgements and statements related to a research article in the field of neuroscience. It acknowledges the contributors to the article and provides their Twitter handles for further information. The authors state that they have no conflicts of interest and provide a link to the peer review history of the article. They also mention that the data supporting the findings of the study can be obtained from the corresponding author upon request. [Extracted from the article]

Autistic individuals show substantially reduced benefit from observing visual articulations during audiovisual speech perception, a multisensory integration deficit that is particularly relevant to social communication. This has mostly been studied using simple syllabic or word‐level stimuli and it remains unclear how altered lower‐level multisensory integration translates to the processing of more complex natural multisensory stimulus environments in autism. Here, functional neuroimaging was used to examine neural correlates of audiovisual gain (AV‐gain) in 41 autistic individuals to those of 41 age‐matched non‐autistic controls when presented with a complex audiovisual narrative. Participants were presented with continuous narration of a story in auditory‐alone, visual‐alone, and both synchronous and asynchronous audiovisual speech conditions. We hypothesized that previously identified differences in audiovisual speech processing in autism would be characterized by activation differences in brain regions well known to be associated with audiovisual enhancement in neurotypicals. However, our results did not provide evidence for altered processing of auditory alone, visual alone, audiovisual conditions or AV‐ gain in regions associated with the respective task when comparing activation patterns between groups. Instead, we found that autistic individuals responded with higher activations in mostly frontal regions where the activation to the experimental conditions was below baseline (de‐activations) in the control group. These frontal effects were observed in both unisensory and audiovisual conditions, suggesting that these altered activations were not specific to multisensory processing but reflective of more general mechanisms such as an altered disengagement of Default Mode Network processes during the observation of the language stimulus across conditions. Lay Summary: In a noisy environment it is often easier to understand another person when we can also see that person's face, and with that, the facial movements that accompany speech. This is called multisensory integration and it means that the brain combines what is heard and seen to make perception and communication easier. It turns out that individuals on the Autism Spectrum have difficulty with multisensory integration especially when trying to understand speech. At this point, we don't know exactly how autistic brains differ from non‐autistic brains that causes this. To understand this better we used what is called functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe the brain activity of autistic and non‐autistic participants while viewing a speaker reading a story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) is a Canadian response to the challenge of ensuring university and college teachers have appropriate instructional skills. The programme is particularly successful in engaging teachers to enhance their stance towards student-centred teaching. This article explains the benefits of the ISW and explores possible reasons why despite proving popular in over 60 countries, it has not as yet been taken up in the UK. The authors conclude with a suggestion that the ISW could be a valuable addition to the UK approach of PG Certs and HEA accreditation.

Background: Altered patterns of eye-movements during scene exploration, and atypical gaze preferences in social settings, have long been noted as features of the Autism phenotype. While these are typically attributed to differences in social engagement and interests (e.g., preferences for inanimate objects over face stimuli), there are also reports of differential saccade measures to non-social stimuli, raising the possibility that fundamental differences in visuo-sensorimotor processing may be at play. Here, we tested the plasticity of the eye-movement system using a classic saccade-adaptation paradigm to assess whether individuals with ASD make typical adjustments to their eye-movements in response to experimentally introduced errors. Saccade adaptation can be measured in infants as young as 10 months, raising the possibility that such measures could be useful as early neuro-markers of ASD risk. Methods: Saccade amplitudes were measured while children and adults with ASD (N = 41) and age-matched typically developing (TD) individuals (N = 68) made rapid eye-movements to peripherally presented targets. During adaptation trials, the target was relocated from 20-degrees to 15-degrees from fixation once a saccade to the original target location was initiated, a manipulation that leads to systematic reduction in saccade amplitudes in typical observers. Results: Neither children nor adults with ASD showed any differences relative to TD peers in their abilities to appropriately adapt saccades in the face of persistently introduced errors. Conclusion: Of the three studies to date of saccade adaptation in ASD, none have shown deficits in saccade adaptation that are sufficient to generalize to the whole or a subgroup of the ASD population. Unlike prior studies, we found no evidence for a slower adaptation rate during the early adaptation phase, and no of evidence greater variance of saccade amplitudes in ASD. In post hoc analysis, there was evidence for larger primary saccades to non-adapted targets, a finding requiring replication in future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to attend to one among multiple sources of information is central to everyday functioning. Just as central is the ability to switch attention among competing inputs as the task at hand changes. Such processes develop surprisingly slowly, such that even into adolescence, we remain slower and more error prone at switching among tasks compared to young adults. The amplitude of oscillations in the alpha band (~8-14 Hz) tracks the top-down deployment of attention, and there is growing evidence that alpha can act as a suppressive mechanism to bias attention away from distracting sensory input. Moreover, the amplitude of alpha has also been shown to be sensitive to the demands of switching tasks. To understand the neural basis of protracted development of these executive functions, we recorded high-density electrophysiology from school-aged children (8-12 years), adolescents (13-17), and young adults (18-34) as they performed a cued inter-sensory selective attention task. The youngest participants showed increased susceptibility to distracting inputs that was especially evident when switching tasks. Concordantly, they showed weaker and delayed onset of alpha modulation compared to the older groups. Thus the flexible and efficient deployment of alpha to bias competition among attentional sets remains underdeveloped in school-aged children.

Atypical processing and integration of sensory inputs are hypothesized to play a role in unusual sensory reactions and social-cognitive deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Reports on the relationship between objective metrics of sensory processing and clinical symptoms, however, are surprisingly sparse. Here we examined the relationship between neurophysiological assays of sensory processing and (1) autism severity and (2) sensory sensitivities, in individuals with ASD aged 6-17. Multiple linear regression indicated significant associations between neural markers of auditory processing and multisensory integration, and autism severity. No such relationships were apparent for clinical measures of visual/auditory sensitivities. These data support that aberrant early sensory processing contributes to autism symptoms, and reveal the potential of electrophysiology to objectively subtype autism.

Motor atypicalities are common in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and are often evident prior to classical ASD symptoms. Despite evidence of differences in neural processing during imitation in autistic individuals, research on the integrity and spatiotemporal dynamics of basic motor processing is surprisingly sparse. To address this need, we analysed electroencephalography (EEG) data recorded from a large sample of autistic (n = 84) and neurotypical (n = 84) children and adolescents while they performed an audiovisual speeded reaction time (RT) task. Analyses focused on RTs and response‐locked motor‐related electrical brain responses over frontoparietal scalp regions: the late Bereitschaftspotential, the motor potential and the reafferent potential. Evaluation of behavioural task performance indicated greater RT variability and lower hit rates in autistic participants compared to typically developing age‐matched neurotypical participants. Overall, the data revealed clear motor‐related neural responses in ASD, but with subtle differences relative to typically developing participants evident over fronto‐central and bilateral parietal scalp sites prior to response onset. Group differences were further parsed as a function of age (6–9, 9–12 and 12–15 years), sensory cue preceding the response (auditory, visual and bi‐sensory audiovisual) and RT quartile. Group differences in motor‐related processing were most prominent in the youngest group of children (age 6–9), with attenuated cortical responses observed for young autistic participants. Future investigations assessing the integrity of such motor processes in younger children, where larger differences may be present, are warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]