Associate Professor
Yale Child Study Center & Diagnostic Radiology
PO Box 207900
230 S. Frontage Rd
New Haven CT 06520-7900
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Robert T. Schultz, Ph.D. Associate Professor Yale Child Study Center & Diagnostic Radiology PO Box 207900 230 S. Frontage Rd New Haven CT 06520-7900 |
Research Interests
I am interested in understanding the biological bases of developmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders, genetic forms of mental retardation, and various childhood psychiatric disorders. My training is in clinical psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroimaging. I serve as the Director of the Yale Developmental Neuroimaging Program. My recent research has focused on the use of structural and functional MRI to study social cognition and face perception, particularly as these can be related to deficits found in persons with autism and related disorders. I am especially interested in the role of a specific brain region, the "fusiform face area" (FFA), in both face perception and in social knowledge. My work has helped define this as one of the key nodes for understanding social deficits in autism. Currently, one focus of work in my lab is understanding the relationship between the FFA and other nodes that subserve social-emotional competencies. As part of this process, we are conducting an intervention study whereby we train persons with an autism spectrum disorder to become better at recognizing faces and facial expressions, using a computerized gaming platform. With pre- and post-fMRI measurements, we hope to better understand possible causal relationships between autism symptomatology and capacities of underlying neural systems.
Selected Publications:DiCicco-Bloom, E., Lord, C., Zwaigenbaum, L., Courchesne, E,, Dager, S., Schmitz, C, Schultz, R. T., Crawley, J., Young, L. J. (2006). The developmental neurobiology of autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 6897-6906.
Grelotti, D.J., Klin,A.J., Gauthier, I., Skudlarski, P., Cohen, D.J., Gore, J.C., Volkmar, F.R., & Schultz, R.T. (2005). fMRI activation of the fusiform gyrus and amygdala to cartoon characters but not to faces in a boy with autism. Neuropsychologia, 43(3), 373-385.
Schultz, R.T. (2005). Developmental deficits in social perception in autism: The role of the amygdala and fusiform face area. International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience, 23, 125-141.
Jackowski, J.P. & Schultz, R.T. (2005). Foreshortened dorsal extension of the central sulcus in Williams Syndrome, Cortex, 41, 282-290.
Koenig, K., Klin, A. & Schultz, R.T. (2004). Deficits in social attribution ability in Prader-Willi syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disabilities,34(5), 573-582.
Pasley, B.N., Mayes, L.C. & Schultz, R.T. (2004). Subcortical discrimination of unperceived objects during binocular rivalry. Neuron, 42, 163-172.
Volkmar, F., Lord, C., Bailey, A., Schultz, R.T., & Klin, A. (2004). Autism and pervasive developmental disorders. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45 (1),135-170.
Chui, H., Win, L., Schultz, R., Duncan, J.S., Rangarajan, A. (2003). A unified non-rigid feature registration method for brain mapping. Medical Image Analysis, 7(2), 113-130.
Papademetris, X., Jackowski, A.P, Schultz, R. T., Staib, L. H. & Duncan, J. S. (2003). Non-rigid brain registration using extended robust point matching for composite multisubject fMRI analysis. In Proceedings of The Sixth International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer- Aided Intervention (MICCAI), LLNCS 2879, 788-795, Springer Verlag.
Wang, Y., Schultz, R.T., Constable, R.T., Staib, L.H. (2003). Nonlinear estimation and modeling of fMRI data using spatio-temporal support vector regression. Information Processing in Medical Imaging Proceedings, 647-659.
Schultz, R.T., Grelotti, D.J., Klin, A., Kleinman, J., Van der Gaag, C., Marois, R. & Skudlarski, P (2003). The role of the fusiform face area in social cognition: Implications for the pathobiology of autism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B, 358, 415-427.
PDF moviesSchultz, R.T., & Anderson, G. (2003). Neurobiology of autism and the pervasive developmental disorders. In D.S. Charner & E.J. Nestler, The Neurobiology of Mental Illness (2nd edition), Oxford University Press 954-967.
Tsatsanis, K. D., Rourke B. P., Klin, A., Volkmar, F. R., Cicchetti, D., Schultz, R. T. (2003). A volumetric evaluation of the thalamus in high-functioning individuals with autism. Biological Psychiatry, 53: 121–129.
Klin, A., Jones, W., Schultz, R.T., Volkmar, F. R. (2003). The enactive mind - from actions to cognition: Lessons from autism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 358, 345 - 360.
Klin, A, Jones, W., Schultz, R.T., Volkmar, F., & Cohen, D.J. (2002) Visual fixation patterns during viewing of naturalistic social situations as predictors of social competence in individuals with autism. Archives of General Psychiatry, 59, 809-816.
Grelotti, D, Gauthier, I., & Schultz, R.T. (2002). Social interest and the development of cortical face specialization: What autism teaches us about face processing. Developmental Psychobiology, 40,213-225.
Schultz, R.T. (2001). The neural basis of autism. In NJ Smelser & PB Baltes (Eds) International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. New York: Elsevier Science, 983-987.
Schultz, R.T., Gauthier, I., Klin A., Fulbright, R., Anderson, A., Volkmar, F., Skudlarski, P., Lacadie, C., Cohen, D.J., Gore, J.C. (2000). Abnormal ventral temporal cortical activity during face discrimination among individuals with autism and Asperger syndrome. Archives of General Psychiatry: 57, 331-340.
Schultz, R.T. Romanski, L., Tsatsanis, K. (2000). Neurofunctional models of Autistic Disorder and Asperger Syndrome: Clues from neuroimaging. In A. Klin, F.R Volkmar & S.S Sparrow (Eds.) Asperger Syndrome. New York: Plenum Press, 179-209.
Zeng, X., Staib, L., Schultz, R.T., & Duncan, J. (1999). Segmentation and measurement of the cortex from 3D MR images using coupled surfaces propagation. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 18, 927-937.
Schultz, R.T., Cho, N.K., Staib, L.H., Kier, L.E., Fletcher, J. M., Shaywitz, S.E., Shankweiler, D.P., Katz, L., Gore, J.C., Duncan, J. S.,& Shaywitz, B. (1994). Brain morphology in normal and dyslexic children: The influence of sex and age. Annals of Neurology, 35, 732-742.
Willerman, L, Schultz, R., Rutledge, N., & Bigler, E. (1991). In vivo brain size and intelligence. Intelligence, 15, 223-228.