Lecture 10 - autism Flashcards
describe autism triangle
a variable constelleation of syptoms grouped into three areas: social interaction, communication, activities and interests
what is autism including its discovery / naming
a developmental condition, discovered by Leo Kanner (1943) and Hans Asperger (1944), that may profoundly affect social behaviour and understanding - the ability to relate to other people, interact and communicate with them in reciprocal social relations
kanner decription of autism
children with a core failure in basic abilities for social interaction and communication - the autistic solitude, a pathological resistance to change
hans asperger description of autism
asperger: some high-functioning individuals with intact (or superior) physical / mathematical intelligence and language, but marked problems of social interaction and circumscribed, obsessive interests
the colour slider metaphor fr autism
together the interactions of all sliders combine to produce a unique colour, and similarly all the different traits of autism combine together in different ways to create all the diversity within the autism spectrum
complex, variable arrays causes produce widely variable manifestations with different levels of severity in the spectrum
uta frith on autism
autism is no longer a narrow category but has widened enormously to embrace a whole range of autistic conditions. It has now become generally accepted to tlak about an autism spectrum … a vast array of autisms
at the core there is always a characteristic inability to engage in ordinary reciprocal social interaction. there is also a characteristic rigidity of behaviour, with a multitude of consequences
does the autistic child have ToM: baron-cohen, lesli and frith 1985
majority of children with autism failed traditional FB tests despite being older, having more general intelligence and better linguistic skills than the controls (both healthy children and children with downs syndrome) -> a domain specific deficit in ToM
autism impairments in ToM components
2-11 months: beginning of primar intersubjectivity - aytipical social attention
12 months: perceptual / attention / inattention - lack of spontaneous gaze following, but may show intact ablity on demand
18 months: pretend actions (make-believe play): scarce if shown at all
2-3 years desires: good understanding
3-4 years: knowledge ignorance: some understanding (about 50%)
4-5 years: false belief - deficient in most children (80%) but high functioning adults may show very good ability to pass complex tests in the lab, but poor social skills (and fail implicit FB tests)
autism as a specific impairment in ToM abilities dissociated from other cognitive skills that may remain intact
yes this is the argument made by baron-cohen
but research showed ToM could not be the whole explanation of autism: there could be impirments in executive functioning, and more that are difficult to explain from ToM
mindblindness in autism may be relative and greatly vary acorss individuals and depend upon that nature of the tasks - explicit social tasks might be easier than implicit tasks in autism
implicit / explicit dissociation in autism - explain the study
leekam, baron-cohen, mildres and brown (1997)
comparing typical, autistic and down syndrome children (5-16yo) in their ability to follow gaze
1. gaze monitoring task: spontaneous gaze following to a person’s sudden change of head and eye-movement
2. elicited-gaze following: a person turne head or eyes towards a target and the child is asked to report which object the person is looking at
results
child with autism looks intently to experimenter when she looks away but fails to follow her gaze, but when verbally asked where the eexperimenter was looking, the majority responded correctly
child with down’s syndrome follows gaze and double checks experimenters gaze
results suggest a dissociation between implicit and explicit gaze foloowing, with the latter being easier in autism
geometric testing of the psychophysics of eye direction detection (perret Mildres Task)
photos of person looking at one of three coloured rods (ref, green, yellow)
child asked to identify which rod the person is looking at
spacing between rods and persons head/eye orientation varied
eyes and head direction could be congruent or incongruent
children with autism as good, or even superior in their ability to compute the precise target of a persons visual attention in this explicit gaze following task
summary of explicit and implicit gaze following with autism
the distinction between implicit anf explicit social cognitive skills might be particularly relevant for autism
some of the more characteristically altered skills in autism may be among the simplest in terms of ToM representational complexity (gaze following is a far cry from FB understanding)
the traditional ToM approach in autism gave way to broader notions of social cognition
some authors even suggested non-ToM approached to social congition
but with implicit / explicit FB tests the ToM question returns to the forefront of autism research
non ToM approaches to social cognition
Klin, Jomes and Colls (2002, 2003)
the who’s afraid of virginia woolf study
- high functioning persons with autism / aspergers syndrome attend either not to the face at all, or to the mouth areas of faces instead of the eyes (which typical viewes prefer) when watching a movie depicting complex social interaction - a problem with a lack of salience of social cues?
an alteration in the relative salience of social stimuli?
clinical reports about the absence of eye contact in children with autism
developmental findings about preferential attention to the face, especially the eyes in typical infants
can these alterations in basic processes of social attention and implicit social cognition be traced back developmentally
could they provoke a cascading developmental effect leading to the atypical social cognition in autism
logic behind prospective studies of new siblings of children with autism
siblings of children with autism are at an increased risk - about 10 times more likely to receive a diagnosis of autsim
this is exploited by researcher in the prospective studies paradigm: means we can identify early signs of autism and better understand how it develops
