About

Dr. Leslie Carver is a member of the UC San Diego Developmental Neuroscience Lab. The lab focuses on research related to developmental neuroscience, exploring various aspects of language, cognition, and early learning. Specific details about her background, research focus, or key contributions are not provided on the page. For more information, contact details are available, including a phone number, email, and physical address at UC San Diego.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Psychology
• Audiology
• Developmental psychology
• Computer Science
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology
• Geography
• Communication

Selected publications

• Adult Social Implicit Learning

  Open Science Framework · 2026-01-01

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  Predictive coding, especially in a social context, appears to be challenging for autistic individuals (Keysers et al., 2024; Van de Cruys et al., 2014; von der Lühe et al., 2016). Specifically, autistic individuals may overlearn about the volatility in their environment and make overly precise predictions that are unable to account for the range, nuance, and variation that exists in social interactions (Keysers et al., 2024; Van de Cruys et al., 2014). Therefore we expect social implicit learning and prediction to be more challenging for adults with a higher rate of autistic traits. The Adult Social Implicit Learning research project has two purposes. The first objective is to examine whether performance on the tasks decreases as autistic traits increase. The second purpose is to test a novel social and nonsocial implicit learning paradigm adapted from the Weather Prediction Task (WPT). We want to see whether participants are able to implicitly learn the underlying rules and patterns of the task and improve their accuracy. Before beginning the experimental task, participants will complete the shortened Social Responsiveness Scale (shortened SRS) to probe autistic traits. Next, they will complete adaptations of the WPT. The WPT is an implicit learning paradigm in which participants are presented with one to three cards out of four possible cues cards with geometric patterns and are asked to say whether the weather will be rain or shine based on those cards (Gluck et al., 2002). Over the course of the experiment, participants improve their abilities to make these predictions (Gluck et al., 2002; Rustemeier et al., 2013). Non-declarative strategies have been shown to be the most common and most effective in this task (Rustemeier et al., 2013). The adapted social task has four cue cards with social actions and 12 outcome cards with socioemotional responses. The adapted nonsocial task has four cue cards with geometric patterns and 12 outcome cards with different types of weather. In an online asynchronous study, participants first see two cue cards that are associated with outcome cards with different probabilities. Then they will see two outcome cards and will be asked to determine what the outcome will be based on the two cue cards presented in each trial. There will be three acquisition blocks with feedback and one test block without feedback. At the end of the task, a questionnaire probing declarative knowledge of the relationships between the cue cards and the outcome cards will be administered. If participants are able to answer the questions correctly, that indicates that they used explicit knowledge to improve their task performance, but if they are unable to, that indicates using implicit knowledge. The social stimuli will include social patterns that are atypical to real life to disallow participants from using prior social knowledge to complete the task. Changes in accuracy over time and accuracy in the test phase will be measured. Additionally, we will examine whether accuracy changes as one’s level of autistic traits changes. We expect to find that participants will improve their accuracy over time, and will perform above chance on the test block. We also expect participants with higher autistic traits to perform worse on the social task, but similarly on the nonsocial task.

  PublisherDOI

• Holistic Face Processing in Children with Autism

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-02-18

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Study Conducted on Children Helping Science Exploring the Composite Face Effect in Children With Autism

  Publisher

• Differences in causal reasoning in preschool-aged children with and without autism

  Child Development · 2026-01-06

  articleOpen access

  The abilities to reason probabilistically and infer causality at a distance support social inferences and emerge early in neurotypical development. We examined these capacities in 3- to 5-year-olds with and without autism. In Experiment 1 (N = 100, 73% males, predominantly White), autistic children were unable to discriminate high- from low-probability causes until age 5, whereas neurotypical children succeeded by age 3. In Experiment 2 (N = 100, 71% males, predominantly White), autistic children inferred non-contact causality in physical events by age 3 and in social events by age 4, with exploratory data suggesting group differences. We conclude that early emerging differences in children's interpretation of socially relevant causal cues may partly contribute to the development of social differences in autism.

  PublisherDOI

• Stimulus Preceding Negativity and Reward Anticipation to Social/Nonsocial Stimuli in 3-4 Year-Old Children

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Sex-Related Measurement Bias in Autism Spectrum Disorder Symptoms in the Baby Siblings Research Consortium

  JAMA Network Open · 2025-08-08 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Importance: Disparities exist in age of diagnosis and prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) for female compared with male children. Correcting for sources of bias is critical for improving equitable ASD identification. Objective: To determine whether sex differences exist in measurement of ASD symptoms using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) among young children at high familial likelihood (HFL) and low familial likelihood (LFL) of ASD. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study collected longitudinal, prospective data from the Baby Siblings Research Consortium between January 1, 2003, and December 31, 2021. Participants included 3106 children who had an older sibling with ASD (HFL group) and 1444 without (LFL group). Data from as many as 3 visits when participants were aged 20 to 40 months were included. Analysis occurred between March 1, 2023, and May 29, 2025. Exposures: Child sex and age and ASD diagnosis. Main Outcomes and Measures: Measurement invariance by sex and age was examined across item-level ADOS data. Diagnostic group and sex differences were then examined using mixed-effect models on corrected scores. Results: Repeated visits (n = 7557) from 4550 participants (2548 [56.0%] male) were included, of whom 1444 (31.7%) were in the LFL and 3016 (68.3%) in the HFL groups. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated social communication and restricted and repetitive behaviors models fit the data well in the HFL group but poorly in the LFL group. In the HFL group, females were rated as less impaired in eye contact (differential item functioning estimate [SE] = 0.088 [0.033]; P = .01), and their response to joint attention (differential item functioning estimate [SE] = 0.290 [0.105]; P = .01) and quality of social overtures (differential item functioning estimate [SE] = 0.053 [0.019]; P = .005) was associated with less underlying social communication difficulties compared with males. Adjusting for differential item functioning by age and sex resulted in moderate levels of measurement differences. Females showed milder autistic traits than males, although this gap was smaller in the participants diagnosed with ASD. Conclusions and Relevance: Sex differences exist in the general population in many social communication traits, yet ASD diagnostic thresholds do not account for these sex differences. Future instrument development, as well as clinician training, should acknowledge milder presentation (fewer difficulties with eye contact or quality of social impairments) in many females. This may help identify developmental differences earlier and improve outcomes for autistic females (estimate [SE] = -0.160 [0.061]; P = .009).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Visual Identity of Objects Facilitates Early Auditory Processing of Congruent Sound

  Journal of Vision · 2025-07-15

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  An object’s visual identity can elicit expectations of contingent sounds. We asked whether auditory responses are sensitive to auditory contingencies that are linked to the visual identity of an object. We were guided by the hypothesis that behavioral and neural responses are facilitated when sensory input matches expectations relative to violations. 20 neurotypical adults were exposed to audio-visual (AV) contingences in an exposure- test phase design. During exposure, participants viewed pairs of shapes that spun to generate high- or low-pitch tones that were predicted by the object's shape. Participants engaged in a 2-alternative forced choice pitch classification task while high- density EEG was recorded. During test, participants were shown three conditions: audio-only, AV-match, and AV-mismatch (3-level between-subjects factor). AV-match trials maintained original shape-sound pairings from exposure, while AV-mismatch trials switched these pairings in 20% of trials. We conducted three linear mixed-effects models that used amplitudes associated with the P50, N100, and P200 ERP components as the dependent measures. Another mixed-effects model was used to assess reaction times from the 2- AFC task across individual trials of the test phase. An analysis of response time identified a main effect of condition (p=.04), such that RT’s were faster for the AV-match condition compared to AV-mismatch, while the audio-only condition was not different from either. With regards to the EEG data, we observed a main effect of condition on the P50 amplitudes (p<.001), where amplitudes were greater for the AV- mismatch condition compared to AV-match (p=.002). We also observed a main effect of condition for the P200 amplitudes (p<.001), suggesting that the AV-match condition had smaller amplitudes compared to audio-only (p<.001) and AV-mismatch (p=.02). These findings show that an object’s visual identity can facilitate early sensory processing of sound linked to that object, advancing our understanding of how visual cognition affects auditory perception.

  PublisherDOI

• Multimodal pathways to joint attention in infants with a familial history of autism

  Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience · 2023-11-14 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Joint attention (JA) is an early-developing behavior that allows caregivers and infants to share focus on an object. Deficits in JA, as measured through face-following pathways, are a defining feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and are observable as early as 12 months of age in infants later diagnosed with ASD. However, recent evidence suggests that JA may be achieved through hand-following pathways by children with and without ASD. Development of JA through multimodal pathways has yet to be studied in infants with an increased likelihood of developing ASD. The current study investigated how 6-, 9- and 12-month-old infants with (FH+) and without (FH-) a family history of ASD engaged in JA. Parent-infant dyads played at home while we recorded the interaction over Zoom and later offline coded for hand movements and gaze. FH+ and FH- infants spent similar amounts of time in JA with their parents, but the cues available before JA were different. Parents of FH+ infants did more work to establish JA and used more face-following than hand-following pathways compared to parents of FH- infants, likely reflecting differences in infant motor or social behavior. These results suggest that early motor differences between FH+ and FH- infants may cascade into differences in social coordination.

  PublisherDOI

• Still-face redux: Infant responses to a classic and modified still-face paradigm in proximal and distal care cultures

  Infant Behavior and Development · 2022 · 16 citations

  • Psychology
  • Developmental psychology
  • Medicine
  PublisherDOI

• Anticipation to Social and Nonsocial Dynamic Cues in Preschool-Age Children

  Child Development · 2021-03-09 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract The ability to learn from expectations is foundational to social and nonsocial learning in children. However, we know little about the brain basis of reward expectation in development. Here, 3- to 4-year-olds (N = 26) were shown a passive associative learning paradigm with dynamic stimuli. Anticipation for reward-related stimuli was measured via the stimulus preceding negativity (SPN). To our knowledge, this is the first study to measure an SPN in children younger than age 6. Our findings reveal distinct anticipatory neural signatures for social versus nonsocial stimuli, consistent with previous research in older children. This study suggests an SPN can be elicited in preschoolers and is larger for social than nonsocial stimuli.

  PublisherDOI

• Occlusion of dynamic objects influences visual expectations of ensuing sounds

  Journal of Vision · 2021-09-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Moving objects help generate expectations about accompanying sounds and can facilitate early auditory processing of stimuli that match these expectations. At times, a moving object may become occluded by an obstruction; it is unclear to what extent such disruptions to the visual input affect the expectations about subsequent sounds associated with the visual object. We conducted two experiments that examined how dynamic visual input, either fully visible or occluded, influences visual expectations of an ensuing sound. EEG was recorded from adults who passively viewed a red ball that appeared either on the far left or right edge of the display and continuously traversed along the horizontal midline to make contact and bounce off the opposite edge, eliciting a sound at the point of collision. Experiment 1 (n=19) consisted of three conditions: 1) sound with full visual input: a ball was visible when colliding and making a bouncing sound; 2) sound with some visual input: a ball was occluded halfway and not visible during the bouncing sound; 3) sound with no visual input. Experiment 2 (n=17) systematically varied the amount of occlusion to better understand how much visual information is necessary to elicit expectations (AV-full, AV-2/3 – least occluded, AV-1/2, AV-1/3 – most occluded). Our analyses focused on a late slow-wave event-related potential (ERP) measured at occipital electrode sites prior to the onset of the sounds, and revealed differences in the amplitude across the occlusion conditions. In particular, the experiments show that visual occlusion elicits greater slow-wave negativity compared to non-occluded visual input. Overall, these results suggest that occlusion of a dynamic object results in the deployment of neural resources devoted to generating expectations about the timing of an impending auditory event.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R03HD053687

  NIH · $153k · 2010

• NIH Grant R21HD043739

  NIH · $361k · 2006

Frequent coauthors

• Karen R. Dobkins

  University of California, San Diego

  16 shared

• Rebecca Landa

  Cohort (United Kingdom)

  14 shared

• Géraldine Dawson

  Center for Autism and Related Disorders

  14 shared

• Charles A. Nelson

  Harvard University

  11 shared

• Wendy L. Stone

  Cohort (United Kingdom)

  9 shared

• Katherine K. M. Stavropoulos

  9 shared

• Sally Ozonoff

  Cohort (United Kingdom)

  9 shared

• Jana M. Iverson

  9 shared

Labs

• UC San Diego Developmental Neuroscience LabPI