Autism Flashcards
Autism:
- Characteristics
- Prevalence (gender + increase over time attributed to what (4))
- Neurodevelopmental condition characterized by social and communication deficits, and restricted and repetitive behavs
— - Diagnosed more in boys bcuz girls tend to have comorbid intellectual abilities, camouflage behav
- Fetal testosterone might also impact things like oxytocin which impact bonding, requiring less genetic abnormalities in boys to get ASD
1) Substitution of diagnosis (from intellectual disorder to autism)
2) More sensitive screening tools
3) Increased screening of toddlers
4) Increased awareness of ASD
Characteristics of autism
- Social interaction (5)
-Communication (4)
- Restricted/Repetitive behaviours (4)
SOCIAL INTERACTION:
- Limited awareness of/interest in desires/needs/presence of others
- Failure to initiate/respond to social interactions
- Difficulties adjusting behav to suit various social contexts
- Difficulties in making friends
- An emotional remoteness or aloofness
—
COMMUNICATION:
- Delayed/Failed development of language
- Reduced effort to compensate w/ gestures or facial expressions
- Language is repetitive or idiosyncratic (echolalia, neologisms)
- Literal comprehension
—
RESTRICTED/REPETITIVE BEHAVS:
- String attachment w/ objects or features of objects
- Insistence on enviro or behav sameness
- Repetitive body movements or abnormalities in posture
- Hyper or hypo reactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects of enviro
Genetic links of autism:
- Identical twins concordance rate
- Risk-genes are involved in what
- Family history of what increases risk (4)
- What interacts w/ genetic factors to increase risk
- 60-90%
- Involved in synaptic plasticity
- Depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD
- Perinatal complications
Developmental course of autism:
- Infancy
- Early childhood
- School age
- Adulthood
INFANCY:
- Traits manifest before 3 years old as early as 1 year old
- Passive/Unresponsive to being held and cuddled; social behavs to infant fail to elicit recognition/interest
—
EARLY CHILDHOOD:
- Less likely to imitate adults’ gestures
- Limited desire/ability to communicate w/ others
- Cooperative play delayed or not attained
- Repetitive motor behavs, unusual interests, order and sameness take over daily activities
—
SCHOOL AGE:
- Require special ed programs bcuz academic achievement tends to be poor
- Peer interactions minimal
—
ADULTHOOD:
- 10-33% minimally verbal, have intellectual disability, require substantial support; Only 25% w/ avg intelligence and live in own homes
- Those w/ avg intelligence still have low employment rates and self-reported quality of life
Predictors of outcomes in later life (autism):
- Children who show early social communication skills
- Children w/ severe symptoms of ASD
- Reduction in repetitive behavs from age 2-3
Applied behavioural analysis (ABA)
- Less severe ASD symptoms later
- Lower cognitive skills and impaired daily living skills later
- Good predictor of outcome at age 19
—
Behavioural intervention based on operant conditioning; 15-20+ hours per week - Emphasis on play and social interaction
- Communicative initiation by child
- Reduce maladaptive behavs such as self-injury
Autism - Enlargement in which brain areas? (3)
Explain autism’s idiosyncratic functional connectivity pattern
- Frontal lobe
- Temporal lobe
- Cingulate cortex
— - Not consistently higher or lower connection in certain regions, instead loss of shared patterns that differ between ASD ppl
- Interhemispheric coupling usually highest in primary motor and sensory cortices and lower in association areas (middle frontal gyrus and inferior middle temporal gyri)
- Instead ASD show reduced coupling in postcentral gyrus and lateral occipital cortex, and increased in middle frontal gyrus and inferior temporal gyrus
Autism cognitive dysfunction:
- Language
- Delay time
- Discourse and pragmatics
- Echolalia, idiosyncratic speech, atypical prosody, hyperlexia
- Language delayed to 38 months compared to typical 8-14 months
- Deficits in discourse (longer connected streams of speech) and pragmatics (how language is used in context of social interactions)
- Shown thru pedantic/formal speech, failure to engage in conversational repair (explain when partner confused), failure to reaoond adequately to questions/comments during convos
- Echolalia (repeating sounds/words others make); Idiosyncratic speech (using normal words/expressions in abnormal ways); Atypical prosody (monotone, rises at end of sentences); Hyperlexia (advanced reading skills, obsessive interest in letters/numbers)
Autism cognitive dysfunction:
Social cognition
- What is it
- Atypical social behavs (4)
Processes that are involved in perception, encoding, storage, retrieval, regulation of info about other ppl and ourselves
- Poor eye contact, impaired imitation, impaired joint attention, reduced orientation to social stimuli
Autism cognitive dysfunction:
What accounts for the features of autism spectrum disorder?
- Theory of mind (ToM) hypothesis
- Executive function hypothesis
- Sensory processing hypothesis
TOM:
- Proposes that difficulties in representing mental states of others accounts for social and communication deficits in ppl w/ ASD
- Problem: Language deficits happen before ToM develops
—
EXECUTIVE FUNCTION:
- Proposes that impaired executive function skills account for symptoms as they’re unable to simultaneously consider and respond to multiple sources of information or inhibit inappropriate responses
- Problem: Doesn’t explain all symptoms of autism (e.g. language)
—
SENSORY PROCESSING:
- Proposes that social and cognitive deficits are downstream effects of atypical sensory processing in early development
- Basically -> Superior sensory/perceptual processing at cost of ability to integrate social info into meaningful representations
Exploring the impact of adolescent cognitive inflexibility on emotional and behavioural problems experienced by autistic adults (Hollocks et al,. 2022)
Investigate distinct longitudinal association between cognitive inflexibility and emotional/behav problems across adolescence and early adulthood
—
Cognitive inflexibility -> Increased behav problems at 16 years and emotional problems across time points
- Distinct from effects of restricted/repetitive behav and verbal intelligence
Sensory-to-Cognitive systems integration is associated w/ clinical severity in autism spectrum disorder (Martinez et al., 2020)
Examine functional connectivity integration between primary model sensory regions and heteromodal processing cortex + if abnormalities in network relate to clinical severity
—
ASD showed:
- Hyperconnectivity in visual cortex at initial link step distances
- Hyperconnectivity between sensory unimodal regions and regions of DMN
- Hyperconnectivity between sensory unimodal regions and areas of fronto-parietal and attentional networks
* Patterns were associated w/ higher clinical severity
