Lab Overview

Lab Overview

Our lab conducts related multi-disciplinary research programs investigating the essential characteristics and developmental trajectories of the cognitive and linguistic phenotypes that define different neurodevelopmental disorders, and the relationship between these phenotypic characteristics and brain structure and function.

History

Our Lab was originally located at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where Dr. Tager-Flusberg taught for over 20 years.  The lab moved to the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center(now part of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center) in 1996, and then in 2001, we moved to Boston University School of Medicine.

Our research initially focused on comparing conceptual, semantic, and grammatical knowledge in children with autism to children with intellectual disability or Down syndrome using cross-sectional experimental paradigms and longitudinal studies of naturalistic language data.  In the early 1990s, we began investigating the relationships between language and theory of mind in children with autism or specific language impairment (SLI), and by the mid-1990s, we expanded our program to studies of theory of mind and other aspects of social cognition and social perception in children with Williams syndrome.

In the late 1990s we began a large NIH-funded program project exploring behavioral and brain imaging studies of language, theory of mind and other aspects of social information processing in autism or language impairment (part of the Collaborative Programs of Excellence in Autism – CPEA), and then were awarded an NIH Autism Center (part of the STAART program) to address family, developmental, treatment and brain imaging and pathology studies focusing on the social-affective components of the autism phenotype.

In 2009, following Dr. Tager-Flusberg’s appointment as the Director of the Developmental Science program in the Department of Psychology at Boston University, part of the lab moved to the Charles River Campus.  Our studies of Williams Syndrome continued at the Boston University School of Medicine until Summer 2011. Our studies on autism take place in the Psychology department on the Charles River Campus and Children’s Hospital.  Our brain imaging studies using magnetic resonance imaging methods (MRI) continue in collaboration with colleagues at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Our research programs are funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation and Autism Speaks.

Current Research Directions

The broad goals of our research include:

  1. To define the essential characteristics of specific neurodevelopmental disorders – i.e. to shed light on the nature of the deficits and spared capacities that are unique and specific to particular syndromes
  2. To understand the cognitive architecture of neurodevelopmental disorders in illuminating theoretical issues of normal development (e.g., dissociation between grammar and functional usage of language in autism; a componential model of theory of mind).
  3. To identify cognitive phenotypic markers or subtypes that will facilitate research on the underlying genetics of certain developmental disorders (especially for autism and SLI, which are both complex genetic disorders) and neuropathology of the syndromes.
  4. To explore the developmental trajectories of behavioral and neural functioning infants at risk for complex neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and SLI,  that will allow us to identify the earliest signs and risk markers.
  5. To explore the relationship between cognitive function and neurobiological substrates in neurodevelopmental disorders, using structural and functional MRI, EEG/ERP, and other new technologies, including NIRS.