Autism Flashcards
What is autism?
Neurodevelopment disorder and so involves atypical brain functioning that emerges early in childhood and lasts their whole life.
The cause is unknown as it’s a complex disorder with the symptoms varying per person making it difficult to find one underlying cause.
There is no known biological marker of ASD therefore it’s behaviourally defined using DSM-5 or ICD-10.
The disorder is fairly common effecting 1 in 100 people and is most common in boys with a 3:1 ratio.
There is new research however that suggests autism may be represented differently in girls and may account for a lack of diagnosis rather than a gender difference.
The autism spectrum
Includes people with Autism, Aspergers, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, Rett’s Disorder and Pervasive Developmental Disorder.
These individual disorders were recently recognised to be very similar and are now categorised under one umbrella term.
Symptoms of ASD
Must have all 3 social communication impairments:
>socioemotional reciprocity (relate and engage with others)
>non-verbal communication (eye contact etc)
>developing, maintaining and understanding relationships with others
Must have 2/4 of the restricted and repetitive behaviours:
>stereotyped or repetitive movements, use of objects or speech
>insistence on sameness, inflexible routines and ritualised behaviour
>intense or unusual interests
>sensory difficulties
Single explanation theories criteria
Universal - present in all ASD individuals
Unique - only found in ASD
Explanatory power - explain all impairments
ToM theory of autism
Baron-Cohen et al (1985) hypothesised that individuals with ASD do not have a theory of mind which was supported with 80% of ASD children failing false belief tasks compared to less than 15% in typical and DS children.
Happé’s developmental trajectory shows that ASD children pass the false belief test eventually it’s just delayed. Bowler (1992) suggests that ASD children can use theory of mind they just have a different pathway which is slower and less automatic than typical children which can make them appear strange in social situations.
Overall is not universal as not all children with ASD fail false believe task although this may reflect measurement. ToM is also not unique to ASD individuals as its possible to have poor ToM but not ASD and finally it does not explain all the behavioural symptoms of ASD as it’s more related to social communication than RRB’s.
Frith-Happé animations
show two triangles interacting in a
way that tells a social story moving in a human like way to imply intention, e.g a mother convincing her child to leave the house.
Children are asked to narrate the animation and their script is coded
for the spontaneous and intuitive use of mental state language which
provides a much richer data set than simple pass and fail.
Results show ASD children make more inappropriate mentalising explanations than typical despite performing as well as controls on false believe tasks.
ASD Adults ToM
Anticipatory looking paradigm showed that
typical adults first look was associated with the actors
false belief whereas adults with autism showed no preference for either window (Senju et al., 2009).
This data suggests an absence of spontaneous and intuitive ToM in autism despite ability to pass explicit tasks like Sally Anne task.
EF theory
Refers to cognitive processes that are important for flexible, goal oriented behaviour especially in novel situations and includes; planning, working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility.
Hill (2004) hypothesised that children with autism show executive dysfunction.
Planning - no - Tower of London task
Flexibility - poor - WCST
WM - poor - more robust in regards to spatial than verbal e.g digit span
Inhibition - mixed - stroop not impaired but is in windows task
Summary: universal - no, unique - no but it has been suggested that there may be a specific profile of EF deficits that are unique to ASD, explanatory power - strong for RRB’s for example poor inhibition may explain repetitive motor mannerisms and the inability to ignore your own knowledge in false believe tasks; however it doesn’t offer much explanation for social communication.
Enhanced perceptual functioning theory
Perception is the interpretation of sensory input and is a fundamental building block of more complex cognitive and behavioural processes including EF and ToM.
Mottron et al (2006) hypothesised that perceptual processing is superior in ASD. This superiority is hard to control and disrupts the development of other behaviours and abilities.
Overall the EPF theory is not universal as not only is it a subgroup of ASD individuals but there is evidence of impaired perceptual processing in ASD. There isn’t enough research into EPF in other disorders to know whether it’s unique to ASD but it’s definitely good at explaining sensory sensitivities but relies on a developmental knock on effect of EPF on higher-order social and cognitive abilities to explain the majority of autistic behaviours.
Bonnel et al (2003)
Compared 12 adolescents with ASD to 12 typical controls on pitch discrimination and categorisation tasks.
The ASD group was superior on all measures which supports the hypothesis.
Although this is a very small sample and the ASD group were high functioning so its not inclusive of the whole spectrum.
Jones et al (2009)
Conducted a study using 72 adolescents with ADS and 48 controls that were asked to discriminate two sounds for intensity, duration and frequency.
They found that a subgroup of the ASD individuals had superior performance in discriminating frequency and this group was of average intelligence and delayed language.
Therefore it’s possible language development may be impaired due to over-focus on perceptual cues.
Weak central coherence theory
Having a central coherence causes a natural tendency to process stimuli as a whole; this enables us to make sense of the world.
Having a weak central coherence causes a boas for processing the parts of any stimulus at the expense of the global whole; this causes them to see the world in a fragmented way.
Frith and Happé (2006) hypothesised that children with autism have local processing bias at the expense of processing the whole, although this has been framed as a superiority for perceiving details and features and is viewed as a different cognitive style rather than a deficit.
This theory is not universal as not all ASD individuals show evidence of WCC, its also largely untested in other disorders but there is evidence of WCC in individuals with anorexia and Williams syndrome. It may explain the impairments in social communiaction as focussing to much on certain features can prevent them seeing the whole context and it offers some explanation for RRBs such as intense preoccupations.
The block design task
Involves making an image out of blocks containing fragments of the image and ASD children are superior at this when the image they are trying to create is unsegmented.
However when the image is presented in a segmented way there is no significant difference between ASD and controls, this suggests that ASD individuals see the image in a segmented way anywya which gives them the advantage.
The planning/drawing test
Measures the order of steps a child takes when drawing a basic picture e.g a house.
They found that ASD children start with smaller fragments of the drawing e.g window compared to typical children who would strat with the frame of the house.
Furthermore when drawing a window they may draw 4 individual squares within the square which reflects the fragmented way they see things.
Sentence completion test
Involved inhibition to select a word that fits locally with the end of the sentence rather than a word that fits globally to make sense in the context of the whole sentence e.g “the sea tastes of salt and..” and the local word woulds be pepper but the global one is seaweed.
Adolescents with ASD made more local errors indicating a local bias in context of completing local and global information.
Although a quarter of the ASD group made no local completions (Booth & Happé 2010).
