8b. Autism

Question 1

What are 2 core symptoms of autism?

And what kind of speech do they have?

Answer 1

(1) persistent deficits in social communication/interaction, and (2) restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior/interests.

Idiosyncratic speech: people with ASD may have their own way of using their own words.

Question 2

Which areas are involved in social development? (4x)

Answer 2

1. Amygdala
2. Superior temporal cortex
3. Orbitofrontal cortex
4. Insular cortex

Question 3

Explain ASD in relationship with the amygdala. (2x)

And which area is associated to the amygdala?

Answer 3

In people with ASD the developmental trajectory of the amygdala is disorganized (at some points it is smaller, at other points bigger). These deviations are related to problems in…

• Joint attention: sharing attention for 1 object or 1 gain; the basis of social development.
• Emotion recognition: being able to recognize emotions on people’s faces, voices, etc.

Associated area:
- Orbitofrontal cortex: has really strong connections with the amygdala, so it’s part of a brain network that’s important for emotion recognition, and is deviated in people with ASD.

Question 4

Explain ASD in relationship with the superior temporal cortex. (3x)

Answer 4

Important for…

• Biological motion: the ability to recognize a living being/movements that are natural for a living being, people with ASD have less preference for this.
• Theory of Mind: the ability to recognize mental states in yourself and others, people with ASD have prominent impairments in ToM.
• Language development: people with ASD have language delays.

Question 5

Explain ASD in relationship with the insular cortex.

Answer 5

Involved in…
- The subjective experience of emotions: so not in recognizing them, but the feelings that are associated with things that happen to us.

• Regulation of emotions: is important for learning. If you have to learn something new, this is really frustrating, because at first you can’t do it. So you need that emotion regulation in order to learn efficiently.

Question 6

Which 2 cognitive theories for ASD are there? Explain (the first one with 3x skills)

Answer 6

• Theory of Mind: the ability to recognize mental states in self and others (core impairment). Impairments in ToM are more related to more complex ToM-based skills:
  1) Second-order beliefs: here, it becomes more difficult, because you have to take multiple perspectives to know what’s going on. We know that on average, people are able to go up to 5th-order beliefs, but this is really difficult from a language perspective as well –> the more orders there are, the more difficult it becomes to put it in a sentence.
  2) Faux-pas recognition: scenarios in which social acceptability plays a role. If someone gave you a present and it breaks, you can’t say ‘I don’t care, it’s ugly anyways’, because that person gave it to you, but a person with ASD doesn’t really see the problem there and just says that.
  3) Reading the mind in the eyes: people with ASD are able to recognize basic emotions by objectively describing it, but when it becomes more difficult to describe an emotion, it becomes tricky, and we have to rely on our social radar. Besides that people with ASD do not only process information differently, they also get different information, since they don’t look at the eyes as much as an average person would do. This makes it extra difficult to know what people are thinking.
• Weak central coherence: central coherence means that you can see the whole, and not all the little parts. People with ASD have a weak central coherence, which means that they have trouble looking at the big picture. They see all the details of every scene that’s in their field of vision, leading to sensory overload  they have trouble with filtering out irrelevant information, so everything is equally loud, and this makes the world unpredictable/chaotic/scary.

Question 7

What are 3 causes of autism?

Answer 7

• Genes: autism is highly genetic. We don’t exactly know how genetic it is, but there are up to 400 genes that code for autism, so if one of those genes is different, it increases the vulnerability to autism.
• Medication: for example, a type of medication that enhances the risk of autism is a medicine used against bipolar disorder, but there are many other medications.
• Age of the father: a higher age in the father may increase the risk for autism. But how does that work? Is that because when they are older their genetic make-up changes? Or is it because dating is difficult, and if you have autistic symptoms it becomes more difficult, so if the father has autistic symptoms, it’s more difficult to enter into a long-term relationship with children. In that case, it’s not necessarily the age, but the fact that the father also has autism (so genetic).

Question 8

Which cognitive domains are often tested in a neuropsychological assessment? (5x)

Answer 8

• IQ
• ToM
• Central coherence (Rey complex figure task –> details)
• EF (Wisconsin card sorting test, Zoo test, Tower of London)
• Cognitive flexibility