Clinical Research Directory

Social COgnition Screening

Social cognition refers to the mental processes involved in social interactions, including social perception, motivation, communication, emotion recognition, and theory of mind. Face perception plays a key role in children's social development, but children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) tend to look less at social stimuli, especially faces, than typically developing (TD) peers. Eye-tracking studies highlight these visual exploration differences, linked to difficulties in joint attention, emotion recognition, and theory of mind, as well as in executive and memory functions. Standard diagnostic tests often require active participation and sufficient language, which makes assessment challenging for children with ASD and additional cognitive or language impairments. This research project investigates how visual activity supports social cognition depending on cognitive and language levels, hypothesizing that eye-tracking can provide useful indicators for ASD screening and diagnosis.

Multimodal Quantified Analysis of Facial Movements: Comparison Between Pathological and Control Subjects

The facial palsy is a frequent disease with a lot of etiologies. It has variable severities with sometimes heavy functional repercussions and different recovery potentials. The proposed treatments are based on surgery, physiotherapy and botulinum toxin injections. However, when recovery is incomplete, acceptance is more difficult, with an impacted quality of life. Thanks to Motion Capture and Electromyography, a quantification of the facial mimicry is now possible with a great precision. In addition with the quantification of the facial mimicry, eye-tracking, wich is widely used in the marketing field, but it also finds medical applications including head and neck lesions and facial palsy in particular, will be used to evaluate the visio of the patients on their pathology in function of the movement quantification measured with MoCap and Electromyography. The aim of this research is to measure in a combined way the action potentials by sEMG and the amplitudes of displacement of the markers in motion capture, for movements determined in a population of patients presenting a facial pathology, in order to compare them with reference values obtained in healthy subjects. In a second step, the aim will be to study if there is a link between the way the patient looks at his pathology and the results of his management (treatment, rehabilitation) which will be quantitatively evaluated thanks to MoCap and sEMG.