L7 - Social Communication difficulties in Autism Flashcards
What is autism?
- Neurodevelopmental condition with atypical brain functioning
- Emergent in early childhood
- Causes unknown (can be env e.g parents/womb etc)
- Lifelong condition
- More common in boys & affects 1 in 100 individuals
- Behaviourally defined in DSM and ICD: complex and difficult to diagnose
What is the autism spectrum?
- Individuals on the autism spectrum share certain difficulties in common but vary hugely
- Changed from 2013 (when categorised)
What is The Birthday Party?
- Training film for front-line professionals
- Helping to understand there is variation in the way that the signs of autism present
- Helping them understand that the signs of autism can be subtle
What are some types of autism?
- Avoidant style: less social interest/ability
- Active style: More social interest, directs a group, on own terms
- Passive style: More social interest, prefers one to one, copies to fit in
What are difficulties with social communication?
- Impairment in social-emotional reciprocity
- Impaired non-verbal communication: eye gaze, facial expression, gestures
- Impairment in developing, maintaining and understanding relationships
What are 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
How to diagnose autism?
- Clinician makes decision based on if child has a criterion number of behaviour
- Tools used like the Autism Diagnostic schedule&interview, but approach to diagnosis varies
- Not all children will show all behaviours but they will reach a certain criterion
- Some individuals do not receive a diagnosis until adulthood
Why are we interested in cognition?
- Cognitive theories seek to identify atypical thinking styles in autism
- Informing us about processes underlying autistic behaviours
- Helps understand why behaviours occur
How do psychologists attempted to explain autism in terms of a single underlying cognitive atypicality?
- Cognitive atypicality should be universal in individuals with autism
- Be unique to autism (discriminant variability)
- Show explanatory power by explaining all symptoms and relating to symptom severity
Theory of mind in autism:
- Autistic people do not have a theory of mind: also known as mind blindness or a deficit in mentalising
What was the study looking at the sally-anne task (Baron-Cohen et al. )
- 20 autistic children, 14 with Down Syndrome and 27 younger typically developing children
- 80% with autism cannot impute belief to others so cannot predict behaviours of others
What is a criticism of standard false belief task
1) Does the sally-anne task actually capture real-life mentalising - people with good ToM do not find this effortful. Is not good at capturing if autistic people have good ToM as we give them a lot of time and strategies to work it out
- Counteracted by anticipatory looking and familiarisation tasks
What is anticipatory looking?
- Used anticipatory looking paradigm - spontaneous false belief (without cog demand)
- Found 25 months children look in anticipation towards where a person with false beliefs would search
- Would autistic adults who can pass the Sally-Anne task show this type of spontaneous false-belief understanding
What are familiarisation tasks?
- Actor’s goal is to obtain hidden ball following the cue a window will be opened
- Puppet changes his mind and removes ball
- Actor turns back to find ball
What were the results? (Adults)
- Adults without autism = first anticipatory look was to window associated with actors false beliefs
- However, autistic adults showed no preference for one window over another = suggesting they are not attributing a false belief to the actor
- Data suggests an absence of spontaneous and intuitive theory of mind in autism, despite an ability to pass explicit tasks
Second critique of standard false belief tasks:
- Classic ToM tasks are simple pass/fail responses
- How useful a task is when it has such limited variability
What are Frith Happe animations?
- Two triangles act in a human life way that evoke mental state attribution
- They allow us to measure ToM by coding the spontaneous and intuitive use of mental state language
- Enables wider spread of scores going beyond pass/fail
RESULTS: - The autistic group made more inappropriate mentalising explanations than the other typical groups, despite performing as well as the control groups on standard false belief tasks
Is ToM universal/unique/explanatory power
Universal: Not all autistic children fail standard FB tasks although this may reflect task factors
Unique: You can have difficulties with ToM and not have autism e.g blind/deaf people etc.
EP:
- Absence of ToM leads to critical breakdown in social communication
- Theory does not easily explain restricted and repetitive behaviours
What is executive function?
- General set of skills or mental toolbox
- Cognitive processes that are important for flexible, goal-oriented behaviour, especially in novel circumstances
- Includes planning ability, working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility
What was a study of executive functioning in autism?
- Hypothesis: autistic children show difficulties with aspects of executive function
- Impairment in planning: autistic children are impaired on the Tower of London task and find it hard to plan moves
- Impairment in cognitive flexibility: Impaired on Wisconsin card sorting task and find it hard to shift to sorting by a new rule - but display perseveration
- Working memory: more robust evidence for difficulty with spatial working memory than verbal - can do well on digit span tasks but more difficulty with spatial span
- Inhibition: mixed findings - No impairment on Stroop Task but evidence of difficulty on the windows task with inhibiting a prepotent response
Is Executive Functioning universal/unique/explanatory power
Universal:
- Not all autistic children show deficits on EF tasks
Unique:
- Other clinical groups i.e ADHD show evidence of EF dysfunction
- Might be a specific profile of EF difficulties that is unique to autism
EP:
- Poor executive function = restricted and repetitive behaviours
- Poor cognitive flexibility = repetitive language = intense interests
- Poor inhibition = repetitive motor mannerisms, intense interests
- Poor EF can explain failure on the standard FB task as passing requires inhibition of the more salient reality and working memory
- DOES NOT explain any social and communication behaviour where EF demands are low
