Scholars@Duke
Elena Tenenbaum

Elena Tenenbaum

Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Psychiatry, Child & Family Mental Health & Community Psychiatry
elena.tenenbaum@duke.edu
DUMC 2737, Durham, NC 27710
2424 Erwin Rd., Suite 501, Durham, NC 27705

Selected Publications

Remote Infant Studies of Early Learning (RISE): Scalable online replications of key findings in infant cognitive development.

Journal Article Dev Psychol · January 2025 The current article describes the Remote Infant Studies of Early Learning, a battery intended to provide robust looking time measures of cognitive development that can be administered remotely to inform our understanding of individual developmental traject ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Implementation of NCCARE360, a Digital Statewide Closed-Loop Referral Platform to Improve Health and Social Care Coordination: Evidence from the North Carolina COVID-19 Support Services Program.

Journal Article N C Med J · March 2024 INTRODUCTION: Efforts to improve population health by being responsive to patients' social and economic conditions will benefit from care models and technologies that assess and address unmet social needs. In 2019, NCCARE360 launched in North Carolina as t ... Full text Link to item Cite

Exploring communicative competence in autistic children who are minimally verbal: The Low Verbal Investigatory Survey for Autism (LVIS).

Journal Article Autism · July 2023 Approximately one in three autistic children is unable to communicate with language; this state is often described as minimally verbal. Despite the tremendous clinical implications, we cannot predict whether a minimally verbal child is simply delayed (but ... Full text Link to item Cite

Shorter average look durations to dynamic social stimuli are associated with higher levels of autism symptoms in young autistic children.

Journal Article Autism · August 2022 Many studies of autism look at the differences in how autistic research participants look at certain types of images. These studies often focus on where research participants are looking within the image, but that does not tell us everything about how much ... Full text Link to item Cite

Testing the mid-range model: Attachment in a high risk sample.

Journal Article Dev Sci · May 2022 Infant attachment is a key predictor of later socioemotional functioning, but it is not clear how parental responsivity to infant expressive behavior is associated with attachment outcomes. A mid-range model of responsivity holds that both unresponsive and ... Full text Link to item Cite

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

Journal Article J Autism Dev Disord · October 2021 Eye-tracking is often used to study attention in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous research has identified multiple atypical patterns of attention in children with ASD based on areas-of-interest analysis. Fewer studies have investigate ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

A Six-Minute Measure of Vocalizations in Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Journal Article Autism Res · August 2020 To improve early identification of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we need objective, reliable, and accessible measures. To that end, a previous study demonstrated that a tablet-based application (app) that assessed several autism risk behaviors distinguis ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Autism Heterogeneity in a Densely Sampled U.S. Population: Results From the First 1,000 Participants in the RI-CART Study.

Journal Article Autism Res · March 2020 The objective of this study was to establish a large, densely sampled, U.S. population-based cohort of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The Rhode Island Consortium for Autism Research and Treatment (RI-CART) represents a unique public-private-ac ... Full text Link to item Cite

Perception of Cry Characteristics in 1-Month-Old Infants Later Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Journal Article J Autism Dev Disord · March 2019 This study investigates parental perceptions of cries of 1-month-old infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and non-ASD controls. Parents of children with and without ASD listened to cry recordings of infants later diagnosed with ASD a ... Full text Link to item Cite

Sensitivity to audio-visual synchrony and its relation to language abilities in children with and without ASD.

Journal Article Autism Res · April 2018 UNLABELLED: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often accompanied by deficits in speech and language processing. Speech processing relies heavily on the integration of auditory and visual information, and it has been suggested that the ability to detect corr ... Full text Link to item Cite

Maternal and infant affect at 4 months predicts performance and verbal IQ at 4 and 7 years in a diverse population.

Journal Article Dev Sci · September 2017 Using existing longitudinal data from 570 infants in the Maternal Lifestyle Study, we explored the predictive value of maternal and infant affect and maternal vocalizations during 2 minutes of face-to-face interactions at 4 months on IQ scores at 4.5 and 7 ... Full text Link to item Cite

Attempting to "Increase Intake from the Input": Attention and Word Learning in Children with Autism.

Journal Article J Autism Dev Disord · June 2017 Previous work has demonstrated that social attention is related to early language abilities. We explored whether we can facilitate word learning among children with autism by directing attention to areas of the scene that have been demonstrated as relevant ... Full text Link to item Cite

Infants' early visual attention and social engagement as developmental precursors to joint attention.

Journal Article Dev Psychol · November 2016 This study examined infants' early visual attention (at 1 month of age) and social engagement (4 months) as predictors of their later joint attention (12 and 18 months). The sample (n = 325), drawn from the Maternal Lifestyle Study, a longitudinal multicen ... Full text Link to item Cite

Attention to the mouth and gaze following in infancy predict language development.

Journal Article J Child Lang · November 2015 We investigated longitudinal relations among gaze following and face scanning in infancy and later language development. At 12 months, infants watched videos of a woman describing an object while their passive viewing was measured with an eye-tracker. We e ... Full text Link to item Cite

Bottom-up attention orienting in young children with autism.

Journal Article J Autism Dev Disord · March 2014 We examined the impact of simultaneous bottom-up visual influences and meaningful social stimuli on attention orienting in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Relative to typically-developing age and sex matched participants, children wit ... Full text Link to item Cite

Attention and word learning in autistic, language delayed and typically developing children.

Journal Article Front Psychol · 2014 Previous work has demonstrated that patterns of social attention hold predictive value for language development in typically developing infants. The goal of this research was to explore how patterns of attention in autistic, language delayed, and typically ... Full text Link to item Cite

Increased focus on the mouth among infants in the first year of life: A longitudinal eye-tracking study.

Journal Article Infancy · July 2013 The present study examines face-scanning behaviors of infants at 6, 9, and 12 months as they watched videos of a woman describing an object in front of her. The videos were created to vary information in the mouth (speaking vs. smiling) and the eyes (gazin ... Full text Link to item Cite

Racing to segment? Top-down versus bottom-up in infant word recognition

Journal Article Proceedings of the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development · 2007 Link to item Cite