Development of webcam-collected and artificial-intelligence-derived social and cognitive performance measures for neurodevelopmental genetic syndromes.

This study focused on the development and initial psychometric evaluation of a set of online, webcam-collected, and artificial intelligence-derived patient performance measures for neurodevelopmental genetic syndromes (NDGS). Initial testing and qualitative input was used to develop four stimulus paradigms capturing social and cognitive processes, including social attention, receptive vocabulary, processing speed, and single-word reading. The paradigms were administered to a sample of 375 participants, including 163 with NDGS, 56 with idiopathic neurodevelopmental disability (NDD), and 156 neurotypical controls. Twelve measures were created from the four stimulus paradigms. Valid completion rates varied from 87 to 100% across measures, with lower but adequate completion rates in participants with intellectual disability. Adequate to excellent internal consistency reliability (α = 0.67 to 0.95) was observed across measures. Test-retest reproducibility at 1-month follow-up and stability at 4-month follow-up was fair to good (r = 0.40-0.73) for 8 of the 12 measures. All gaze-based measures showed evidence of convergent and discriminant validity with parent-report measures of other cognitive and behavioral constructs. Comparisons across NDGS groups revealed distinct patterns of social and cognitive functioning, including people with PTEN mutations showing a less impaired overall pattern and people with SYNGAP1 mutations showing more attentional, processing speed, and social processing difficulties relative to people with NFIX mutations. Webcam-collected performance measures appear to be a reliable and potentially useful method for objective characterization and monitoring of social and cognitive processes in NDGS and idiopathic NDD. Additional validation work, including more detailed convergent and discriminant validity analyses and examination of sensitivity to change, is needed to replicate and extend these observations.

Using Flashcards and Descriptive Feedback to Teach Industrial Kitchen Equipment to a Student with Intellectual Disabilities in a Postsecondary Education Program.

With postsecondary education opportunities for adult students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) on the rise, it is important to find socially validated research-based methods that are appropriate for the university or other community-based postsecondary instructional settings. The present research examines the effects of using flashcards with descriptive feedback and opportunities to respond, to teach one student with intellectual disabilities, enrolled in a postsecondary education-training program, commonly used industrial kitchen equipment. Results showed that discrete trail instruction, which included an error correction strategy of descriptive feedback plus opportunities to correctly respond was highly effective in mastery and maintenance of kitchen equipment identification, and generalization when asked to locate those items in the university kitchen lab.