Dr. Lisa Blaskey

Research Staff
Neuropsychologist

Dr. Lisa Blaskey is a clinical neuropsychologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Center for Autism Research (CAR). Dr. Blaskey received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Michigan State University.  She completed her post-doctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.  Dr. Blaskey conducts diagnostic and neurocognitive evaluations for research participants for studies within the Lurie Family Foundations MEG Imaging Center, were she is a co-investigator for studies exploring electrophysiological underpinnings of language impairment in autism spectrum disorders and risk factors and precursors to ASD.  She has also served as a co-investigator and evaluator on large scale, multisite network studies, including projects funded by the NIH, CDC, and Simons Foundation.  Her clinical and research interests include neurocognitive underpinnings of autism spectrum disorders, neurocognitive phenotyping in ASD, neuropsychological assessment, and mechanisms of comorbidity in neurodevelopmental disorders. In addition to her clinical expertise in autism diagnosis, she conducts outpatient neuropsychological evaluations of children with a wide-range of complex medical and neurological conditions in the Outpatient Neuropsychology Service of CHOP’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She can be contacted at blaskey [at] email.chop.edu.  

Related Publications

  • Read More
  • This study introduces an objective neurophysiological marker of language ability, the integral of event-related desynchronization in the 5–20 Hz band during 0.2–1 seconds post auditory stimulation with interleaved word/non-word tokens. This measure correlates with clinical assessment of language function in both ASD and neurotypical pediatric populations. The measure does not appear related to general cognitive ability nor autism symptom severity (beyond degree of language impairment). We suggest that this oscillatory brain activity indexes lexical search and thus increases with increased search in the mental lexicon. While specificity for language impairment in ASD remains to be determined, such an objective index has potential utility in low functioning individuals with ASD and young children during language acquisition.
    Read More

  • 47,XYY syndrome (XYY) is a male sex chromosome disorder where individuals have an X chromosome and two copies of the Y chromosome. XYY is associated with a physical phenotype and carries increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Latencies of auditory evoked responses measured by magnetoencephalography have shown atypical prolongations in several neuropsychiatric and genetic disorders; specifically, delayed auditory responses have been observed in ASD. In this study, we investigated the associations of genotype and clinical phenotype with auditory processing. Whole cortex magnetoencephalography recorded during a passive auditory paradigm (500 Hz tones) was used to assess the auditory evoked response in three groups of male children: idiopathic ASD, typically developing, and XYY boys. Response waveforms were computed for left and right auditory cortex and latencies of the ∼50 ms (M50) and ∼100 ms (M100) components were determined. M50 latencies were significantly delayed compared with typically developing controls in children with ASD in the right hemisphere only, and in children with XYY in the left hemisphere only, irrespective of whether they met diagnostic criteria for ASD. Findings on the later M100 component trended in the same directions but did not attain significance, due to increased variance. Replicating previous findings, decreased M50 and M100 latencies with age were observed bilaterally. Overall, while XYY shares an electrophysiological phenotype (delayed evoked response latency) with idiopathic ASD, the hemispheric differences warrant further investigation.

    Read More
  • Gabrielsen, T.P., Malderelli, J., and Blaskey, L. (2018). Assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorder in the Schools. SAGE Encyclopedia of Intellectual and Developmental Disorders, SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
  • Kuschner, E.S. & Blaskey, L. (2018). Asperger’s Syndrome. Braaten, E. (Ed) SAGE Encyclopedia of Intellectual and Developmental Disorders, SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
  • Blaskey, L. and Malderelli, J. (2018). Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder. In E. Braaten (Ed) SAGE Encyclopedia of Intellectual and Developmental Disorders. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
  • Blaskey, L. and Kuschner, E.S. (2018). 16p11.2 Microdeletion/Microduplication Syndrome. In E. Braaten (Ed) SAGE Encyclopedia of Intellectual and Developmental Disorders. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
  • Rosenberg, S.A., Moody, E.J., Lee, L-C, DiGuiseppi, C., Windham, G.C., Wiggins, L.D., Schieve, L.A., Ledbetter, C.M., Levy, S.E., Blaskey, L., Young, L., Bernal, P., Rosenberg, C.R., and Fallin, M.D. (2018). Influence of family demographic factors on social communication questionnaire scores. Autism Research, 11, 695-706.
  • Berman, J.I., M. Lanza, L. Blaskey, J. Edgar and T. Roberts (2013). High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging Probabilistic Tractography of the Auditory Radiation. American Journal of Neuroradiology 34(8): 1573-1578.
  • Berman, J. I., D. Chudnovskaya, L. Blaskey, E. Kuschner, P. Mukherjee, R. Buckner, S. Nagarajan, W. K. Chung, E. H. Sherr and T. P. Roberts (2016). Relationship between M100 Auditory Evoked Response and Auditory Radiation Microstructure in 16p11.2 Deletion and Duplication Carriers. AJNR Am J Neuroradiol 37(6): 1178-1184.

Pages