Young Ah joined the ARTIS lab in 2022 as a research assistant and started her doctoral position in 2023. Being a co-author of the FWF project Synching Minds Beyond the Face, her research focuses on how autistic and non-autistic people communicate emotions through abstract drawings by using interdisciplinary methods combining behavioral, neural and physiological measures. She is particularly interested in understanding the communicative power of art, especially in neurodivergent population.

Young Ah completed her BSc in Psychology at Durham University and her MSc in Psychiatric Research at King’s College London, where she worked as a part of the autism research team led by Prof. Tony Charman. She continued her career as a research assistant at the Department of Psychiatry at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital in South Korea, where she focused on clinical research for autistic individuals.

Her interest in autism research and art as a communication tool was first sparked by the book Thinking in Pictures by Dr. Temple Grandin, in which Dr. Grandin explains her viewpoint and experience as an autistic person and how she “thinks in pictures” rather than in words. (Although Dr. Grandin later acknowledged that not all autistic people are necessarily visual thinkers like herself, it is considered that there are a good proportion of autistic people who are visual thinkers.) Being an amateur artist herself, Young Ah was greatly interested in exploring the potential of combining autism and art research, which lead to developing the project Synching Minds Beyond the Face in collaboration with Prof. Matthew Pelowski and Prof. Giorgia Silani.

Funded by VDS CoBeNe (Vienna Doctoral School Cognition, Behaviour and Neuroscience), her doctoral project explores cognitive, neural and physiological processes of communicating emotions through abstract drawings in comparison to other more traditional methods of communication such as facial expression and language, in both autistic and non-autistic adults. For this, she uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in combination with electrodermal activity (EDA) and facial electromyography (fEMG) to investigate whether neurophysiological synchrony arises between the artist and the viewer, and how this may be related to how people communicate emotions.