The Orienting Responses
We hoped to screen for FASD by characterizing both the Cardiac Orienting Response and Pupillary Response. Both of these responses are based on the simple idea that higher cognitive function, specifically attention, elicits an autonomic response by both the heart and pupils. By examining changes in these physiological phenomena we can get a sense of the attention regulatory system in infants, and this is correlated with cognitive abilities. When this may be impaired, the pupillary and heart rate response signals will be slower, and less robust compared to a healthy child. We believe these two features are good representations of cognitive function, and based on previous research are well tested in infants only a couple months of age.
The Measurements
To characterize both the Cardiac Orienting Response and Pupillary response we needed non-invasive, non-obtrusive methods to measure both heart rate and pupil dilation in real time. These measurements would be taken over the course of an experiment that we designed based on previous orienting response studies.
The Tools
To measure heart rate we tested two tools:
- Electrocardiogram (EKG): The gold standard
- MIT Developed Eulerian Magnification: Unobtrusive