Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

As evidence of the relationship between the ability to read facial emotions and social functioning continues to emerge from typically developing children, those with neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and acquired brain injuries (e.g., traumatic brain injury), understanding how facial expressions are efficiently processed is increasingly essential to the development of evidence-based treatment, not only for individuals with acquired brain injuries but brain conditions experienced throughout life. This is one of first studies to provide a visual scanning analysis of emotional face processing under fixed-duration and speeded conditions (i.e., common experimental conditions & those more similar to outside the lab, respectively). It controls for variables unrelated to visual scanning that are known to affect task difficulty following brain injury (e.g, motor & memory demands) so that the effect of visual scanning can be examined in detail. Therefore, the results form this initial treatment-development study on typically developing individuals will be invaluable to a future brain-injury subproject. Moreover, they have significant implications for those with neurodevelopmental conditions, typically developing young people, & older adults.