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Maura S Devito

Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Psychiatry, Child & Family Mental Health & Community Psychiatry
DUMC 2737, Durham, NC 27710
2424 Erwin Road, Suite 501, Durham, NC 27705

Selected Publications


Brief report: Attention patterns to non-social stimuli and associations with sensory features in autistic children

Journal Article Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders · October 1, 2022 Background: Aberrant attention patterns have been commonly reported in autistic children. However, few studies have examined attention to non-social stimuli varying in salience and complexity using eye-tracking technology, as well as their links to clinica ... Full text Cite

Patterns of Intervention Utilization Among School-Aged Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Findings from a Multi-Site Research Consortium.

Journal Article Res Autism Spectr Disord · June 2022 When designing and interpreting results from clinical trials evaluating treatments for children on the autism spectrum, a complicating factor is that most children receive a range of concurrent treatments. Thus, it is important to better understand the typ ... Full text Link to item Cite

The autism biomarkers consortium for clinical trials: evaluation of a battery of candidate eye-tracking biomarkers for use in autism clinical trials.

Journal Article Mol Autism · March 21, 2022 BACKGROUND: Eye tracking (ET) is a powerful methodology for studying attentional processes through quantification of eye movements. The precision, usability, and cost-effectiveness of ET render it a promising platform for developing biomarkers for use in c ... Full text Link to item Cite

Pragmatic adaptations of telehealth-delivered caregiver coaching for children with autism in the context of COVID-19: Perspectives from the United States and South Africa.

Journal Article Autism · January 2022 COVID-19 caused many autism spectrum disorder caregiver-coaching studies to move to telehealth. Telehealth can increase the diversity of people who take part in research. This matters because most autism spectrum disorder studies have included people who h ... Full text Link to item Cite

Identifying Age Based Maturation in the ERP Response to Faces in Children With Autism: Implications for Developing Biomarkers for Use in Clinical Trials.

Journal Article Front Psychiatry · 2022 Recent proposals have suggested the potential for neural biomarkers to improve clinical trial processes in neurodevelopmental conditions; however, few efforts have identified whether chronological age-based adjustments will be necessary (as used in standar ... Full text 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

A Phase II Randomized Clinical Trial of the Safety and Efficacy of Intravenous Umbilical Cord Blood Infusion for Treatment of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Journal Article J Pediatr · July 2020 OBJECTIVE: To evaluate whether umbilical cord blood (CB) infusion is safe and associated with improved social and communication abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). STUDY DESIGN: This prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled, doubl ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

The Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT): Scientific Context, Study Design, and Progress Toward Biomarker Qualification.

Journal Article Front Integr Neurosci · 2020 Clinical research in neurodevelopmental disorders remains reliant upon clinician and caregiver measures. Limitations of these approaches indicate a need for objective, quantitative, and reliable biomarkers to advance clinical research. Extant research sugg ... Full text Link to item Cite

Methodological considerations in the use of Noldus EthoVision XT video tracking of children with autism in multi-site studies.

Journal Article Biol Psychol · September 2019 Animal models of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) contribute to understanding of the role of genetics and the biological mechanisms underlying behavioral phenotypes and inform the development of potential treatments. Translational biomarkers are needed that ... Full text Link to item Cite

Biomarker Acquisition and Quality Control for Multi-Site Studies: The Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials.

Journal Article Front Integr Neurosci · 2019 The objective of the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials (ABC-CT) is to evaluate a set of lab-based behavioral video tracking (VT), electroencephalography (EEG), and eye tracking (ET) measures for use in clinical trials with children with auti ... Full text Link to item Cite

Validation of eye-tracking measures of social attention as a potential biomarker for autism clinical trials.

Journal Article Autism Res · January 2018 UNLABELLED: Social communication impairments are a core feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and this class of symptoms is a target for treatments for the disorder. Measures of social attention, assessed via eye-gaze tracking (EGT), have been propose ... Full text Link to item Cite

Autologous Cord Blood Infusions Are Safe and Feasible in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Results of a Single-Center Phase I Open-Label Trial.

Journal Article Stem Cells Transl Med · May 2017 Despite advances in early diagnosis and behavioral therapies, more effective treatments for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are needed. We hypothesized that umbilical cord blood-derived cell therapies may have potential in alleviating ASD symp ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Eye Tracking Reveals Impaired Attentional Disengagement Associated with Sensory Response Patterns in Children with Autism.

Journal Article J Autism Dev Disord · April 2016 This study used a gap-overlap paradigm to examine the impact of distractor salience and temporal overlap on the ability to disengage and orient attention in 50 children (4-13 years) with ASD, DD and TD, and associations between attention and sensory respon ... Full text Link to item Cite

Individual differences in reading aloud: a mega-study, item effects, and some models.

Journal Article Cogn Psychol · February 2014 Normal individual differences are rarely considered in the modelling of visual word recognition--with item response time effects and neuropsychological disorders being given more emphasis--but such individual differences can inform and test accounts of the ... Full text Link to item Cite

Using the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system in preschool classrooms with children with autism spectrum disorders.

Journal Article Autism · September 2013 This study describes the language environment of preschool programs serving children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and examines relationships between child characteristics and an automated measure of adult and child language in the classroom. The L ... Full text Link to item Cite

The unexplained nature of reading.

Journal Article J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn · July 2013 The effects of properties of words on their reading aloud response times (RTs) are 1 major source of evidence about the reading process. The precision with which such RTs could potentially be predicted by word properties is critical to evaluate our underst ... Full text Link to item Cite

The development of memory maintenance: children's use of phonological rehearsal and attentional refreshment in working memory tasks.

Journal Article J Exp Child Psychol · November 2010 Past research suggests that children begin to phonologically rehearse at around 7 years of age. Less is known regarding the development of refreshment, an attention-based maintenance mechanism. Therefore, the use of these two maintenance methods by 6- and ... Full text Link to item Cite