S PR ING BOA RD TO S UCCE SS AES/MVS faculty member tackles motor issues for kids with autism BY DREW MOSER
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aylie Miller is an assistant professor of Applied Exercise Science and Movement Science, director of the Motor & Visual Development Lab, and director of the newly-founded University of Michigan Consortium for Autism Research, Education, & Services (UM-CARES). She joined our school as a faculty member in January 2021. We sat down with Dr. Miller to talk about her background and research. Movement Magazine: Welcome to the School of Kinesiology! Tell us a little bit about your career so far.
| MOVEMENT | FALL 2021
Haylie Miller: I’m a developmental psychologist by training, and my early work was in cognitive neuroscience and development, so I came to kinesiology and movement science through a sort of circuitous route. I have had a lifelong interest in autism, and so in my graduate training I went down the rabbit hole, from the behavioral symptoms of autism to the underlying cognitive, perceptual, and neurological differences we see in this population.
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I held a postdoctoral position at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Center for Autism and Developmental Disorders, where I worked on studies of sensorimotor integration using eye-tracking technology and hand-grip force sensors. It was excellent training in the mechanisms of sensorimotor integration in autism, but I wanted to use tasks that were more like what we experience in the real world. I did a second postdoc at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in the Human Movement Performance Lab, where I did some virtual reality studies. Our participants would play games and move their bodies while we collected data from motion-capture, force plates, and mobile eyetracking. This helped us see how vision is used during natural movement in immersive VR tasks.
MM: Why did you want to study autism? HM: When I was in elementary school, autistic twins were integrated into my classroom (this was back in the ’90s when students with developmental conditions weren’t integrated into mainstream classrooms very often). My teacher did an excellent job of creating opportunities for us to engage with them in meaningful ways. It was a joy to learn with them and try to understand how they communicated, perceived things, and interacted with the world. It sparked a lifelong passion for me, and I continued doing peer mentoring activities with people on the spectrum throughout high school and college. I love the autism community, and am constantly learning from self-advocates. MM: Why did you decide to study autism movement specifically? HM: I saw that it was an understudied aspect of autism. It is something that is acknowledged by everyone, but clinicians are often so focused on communication skills that motor issues fall by the wayside. It seems to me, based on the kids and adults I have spoken with, that movement difficulties are often more of a hindrance than social communication differences. This is fundamental: being able to move your body in the way you want to, intentionally reaching for things, walking around without bumping into things, or cooking a meal for yourself are activities of daily living that impact quality of life. I saw that a big impact could be made if we figure out what the barriers are, and how we can help people work around them. MM: In addition to your faculty role, you are also the director of the Motor & Visual Development Laboratory. What will your lab be working on?
