Daniel Arthur Abrams

Biography

Dr. Daniel Arthur Abrams has initiated a program of research to further understand the auditory brain function serving key elements of speech perception in children with ASD. The first study produced by this program of research was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and shows that children with ASD have weak brain connectivity between voice-selective regions of cortex and the distributed reward circuit and amygdala. Moreover, the strength of these speech-reward brain connections predicts social communication abilities in these children. These results provide novel support for the hypothesis that deficits in representing the reward value of social stimuli, including speech, impede children with ASD from actively engaging with these stimuli and consequently impair social skill development. His future research will leverage this finding by probing this aberrant brain circuit in detailed explorations of speech perception in children with ASD. An important component of his future research is to explore neural plasticity associated with training programs designed to ameliorate social communication deficits in children with ASD, with a focus on the speech-reward brain circuit identified in his recent publication. In addition to his interest in studying social communication and language impairments in children with ASD, his research program also includes investigating the relationship between speech perception impairments and phonological and reading difficulties in children with reading disorders (RD). This work is a continuation of his dissertation work, which examined neural decoding of temporal features in speech in children with RD.

Research Interest

His primary research goals are to understand the brain bases of social communication and language impairments in children with ASD, and to describe neural changes associated with remediation of these behavioral deficits. The theoretical framework that motivates his work is that impaired perception and neural decoding of speech impact social skill and language development in many children with ASD. Moreover, he believe that a grasp of these relationships is central to understanding the etiology of these disorders and will provide insight into their remediation.