Wednesday, September 7, 2016

SIMULATING CORTICAL MAPS FOR ATTENTION SHIFT IN AUTISM

L.-H. Tan, S.-Y. Cho and Y.-Y. Nguwi 

School of Business (IT), James Cook University, Singapore

 ABSTRACT 

Autism is a pervasive neuro-developmental disorder, primarily encompassing difficulties in the social, language, and communicative domains. Because autism is a spectrum disorder, it affects each individual differently and has varying degrees. There are three core aspects of impairment based upon the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), namely impairment in socialization, impairment in communication, and restricted repetitive activities or interests. This work describes the experiment aims at expressing autistic traits through the use of self-organizing map. Works related to simulating autism through self-organizing map is limited. This work compare and contrast the difference in attention index for normal learning and marred attention shift learning ability. It was found that the attention index of normal learning is 9 times better marred attention shift for both random and pre-fixed input data. In the marred attention shift context, neurons adapt more towards the mean of both sources combined under marred context while some neurons adapt towards mean of one source under normal context. The normal learning ability produces maps with neurons orienting towards mean values of combined stimuli source. Impairment in learning ability produces similar cortical maps compared to normal learning ability. The major difference is in the attention index. 

KEYWORDS 

self-organizing map, attention shift, autism, neural network

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