Description:

Joshua Benjamin Ewen, MD
Division Head of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago; Irene Heinz Given and John LaPorte Given Research Professor in Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Human imaging methods like fMRI and EEG have nearly endless degrees of freedom. When the goal of research is to understand the biological mechanisms of behaviors or cognitive abilities, constraining imaging analysis with behavior is critical to reducing these degrees of freedom. When explaining developmental disabilities such as autism, it is however challenging in turn to determine what cognitive abilities drive the whole syndromic manifestation and should be the focal point of biological research. Our team has been using causal modeling to try to test psychological explanatory hypotheses of autism, with the ultimate goal of informing biological research.