Distance from Typical Scan Path When Viewing Complex Stimuli in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and its Association with Behavior

Dr. Tenenbaum is a psychologist and researcher who specializes in language acquisition and cognitive development. Her research and clinical interests focus on communication between children and their caregivers in the context of atypical development.

Dr. Tenenbaum uses eye tracking and other behavioral measures to study typical and atypical trajectories of social attention and language learning. Her work has focused on relations between social attention and word learning, communicative capacity in minimally verbal children with autism, and audio-visual synchrony processing in children with autism. Dr. Tenenbaum has also worked on questions of infant mental health and perinatal depression as it relates to language and cognitive development.  

Dr. Tenenbaum completed her PhD in Psychology at Brown University in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences. She then respecialized in Clinical Psychology at Suffolk University and completed her internship and postdoctoral training at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University.

Dr. Tenenbaum joined the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development in September of 2018.

Dr. Kimberly Carpenter is a clinical neuroscientist specializing in understanding complex brain-behavior relationships in young children with autism and associated disorders. Her program of research includes four interrelated research themes: (1) Understanding the impact of comorbid disorders on clinical and behavioral outcomes of young autistic children; (2) Identification of early risk factors for the development of psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders; (3) Identification of brain-based biomarkers for group stratification and treatment response tracking in young children; and (4) Improving methods for screening, early identification, and treatment monitoring in autism and associated disorders. She currently leads an innovative research program exploring the shared and unique impacts that co-occurring anxiety and ADHD have on brain and behavioral biomarkers in young autistic children. She was the first to demonstrate that sensory over-responsivity, a symptom that has been described as part of a number of disorders including autism, anxiety, and ADHD, is a specific and unidirectional risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders in young children. She was also the first to demonstrate that, when accounting for comorbidity among individual anxiety disorders, specific anxiety disorders are associated with phenotypically meaningful differences in brain connectivity using MRI. Dr. Carpenter has also collaborated with experts in early childhood mental health, computer science, and engineering to develop novel technologies that utilize multi-modal methods via computer vision and machine learning to develop, refine, and test novel screening tools for early identification and treatment monitoring in young children with autism and related disorders.

Autism spectrum disorder diagnosis and treatment, infant-toddler risk and diagnosis, trajectories of early development