Theories of Autism Flashcards
Prevelance of autism
1% of the population (700,000 in the UK) are autistic, most are adults, and many remain undiagnosed
Aspergers syndrome vs autism spectrum disorder
- Autism Spectrum Disorder is the official term in DSM-V
- Aspergers Syndrome (AS) commonly refers to people on the spectrum without language delay or learning disability
What is autism?
Clinically defined by a combination of:
- Impairments in social-communication
- Restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour (including sensory processing differences)
What is autism according to the DSM-V?
- Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, including:
- Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity
- Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviours used for social interaction
- Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understand relationships - Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities
- Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period
- Symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning.
- These disturbances are not better explained by intellectual disability or global developmental delay.
What are the three main cognitive theories of autism?
- Theory of Mind: failure to acknowledge others have their own thoughts and beliefs
- Executive Dysfunction: deficits in inhibition, planning and executive memory
- Weak Central Coherence: preference for local details over the global whole or context.
False belief task in autism, Baron-Cohen et al., (1985)
- Sally-Ann task
- Sally put a ball in a basket and walks away .
- Ann moved the ball out of the basket
- Sally didn’t see this
- Children asked where Sally will look for the ball
- Found that autistic children will look where Ann put the ball as they haven’t developed ToM.
Inferring mental states if geometric figure Kin (2000)
- Autistic people don’t attribute mental states to people, so they won’t attribute mental states to geometric shapes
- Autistic child explains the movement of shapes in a non-materialistic way
- Child without autism explains the movement of shapes attributed to mental states to shapes (e.g. called big square a bully)
Smarties false belief task, Perner et al. (1989)
- child sees smarties tube and assumes smarties inside but it actually has a pencil in it
- asked autistic child what they think the next child will think is in the tube
- the autistic child will think they will say pencil
- can’t take into account someone will think differently despite thinking that way themselves
Contradicting evidence for autism and ToM, Sparrevohn & Howie (1995)
found that autistic children with higher mental age more likely to pass ToM tasks
Contradicting evidence for autism and ToM, Happe (1995)
- Relationship between child’s verbal mental age and passing FB tasks
- Verbal mental age of 12 able to pass compared to 4yrs in typically developing children
1st and 2nd order false belief in autistic children, Baron-Cohen (1989)
- Autistic people pass 1st order, fail 2nd order
- Proposed that ToM problem was a delay rather than a deficit
- But Bowler (1992) found that children with Aspergers pass 2nd order
Is children failing ToM tasks unique to autistic children?
- Children with visual impairment showed difficulty with false belief (Minter, Hobson & Bishop, 1998)
- Children with hearing impairment have development delay in acknowledging false belief (Woolfe, Want & Siegal, 2002)
What is executive control?
The ability to maintain an appropriate problem-solving set for the attainment of a future goal; it includes behaviours such as:
- planning
- impulse control
- inhibition of prepotent but irrelevant responses
- set maintenance
- organized search
- flexibility of search and action.
why was the theory of executive control proposed?
Proposed to account for social & non-social symptoms (repetitive behaviour)
Do autistic children show executive control, Ozonoff et al, 1991
- Tower of Hanoi:Acted impulsively, could not plan several moves ahead, shifted all loops directly, etc
- Wisconsin Card Sort:Unable to shift attentional focus, persevered to sort by established system
- Theory of Mind tests: Many passed 1st orderSome passed 2nd order
ToM tasks not common denominator worst at predicting autistic children performance
Can executive control explain social/communication problems? Russell et al 1991
- window with chocolate inside, task was not to point at the chocolate or they won’t get to have it
- about resisting pointing
- autistic children failed this task
- Perhaps FB task not about lack of insight but more about failure to inhibit
Is executive function the primary cause of ASD? Sodian and Frith (1992)
- Children had to lie to a ‘theif’ that their box of treasure wsa locked
- autistic children could not lie
what is weak central coherence?
- attempts to explain social and non social symptoms
- proposes that autistic people don’t automatically process contextual meaning or use prior knowledge
- autistic people have a bias towards piecemeal or local (over global) processing
Language processing in autistic people, Snowling and Frith, 1986
- Those with autism fail to use context when processing ambiguous homographs. (e.g. The actor took a bow.)
- literal
- difficulties with sarcasm and irony
Embedded figures test, Shah and Frith (1983)
- autistic people found the shape faster than matched controls
Embedded figures test, Pring et al. (1995)
- Individuals with autism were as fast at solving a jigsaw upside-down as right-way-up
Visual illusions and autism, Happe (1996)
- some evidence to argue that autistic people are less susceptible to visual illusions
- but also evidence against
social vs medical model of autsim
social model - recognises any difficulties a person experiences is not just within the person but also between them and the environment
- poor job prospects
- no ramps
- poorly designed buildings
- inaccessible transport
medical model - places autistc difficulties from inside themselves
- can’t work
- looking for a cure
- need help and careres
Diffusion chains (Crompton et al., 2019)
Is autistic peer-to-peer information transfer more efficient than mixed autistic – non autistic?
- 3 of each chain, 1 all autistic, 2. non autistic, 3. mixed
- Matched on age, gender, IQ, education, diagnosis (exc. social anxiety)
- Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer more efficient than mixed chain
The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012)
- when people with very different experiences of the world interact with eachother, they will struggle to empathise with eachother
- autistic – autistic interactions more efficient than autistic – non-autistic interactions
How are autistic people perceived? Sasson et al (2017)
- “thin slice judgements”
- 12 autistic and 16 non-autistic adults recorded while interacting with someone
- Groups matched on age, IQ, gender
- 36 UG students rated the people from 10 images randomly sampled from the videos
- Non-autistic people tended to rate autistic people less socially favourably (except for trustworthy + smart)
- Not due to speech content, but other audio/visual cues
How are autistic people perceived? (Sheppard et al., 2019)
Non-autistic people find autistic people relatively harder to read
How are autistic people perceived? (Alkhaldi et al., 2019)
Non-autistic people might rate autistic people negatively because they are hard to read
How are autistic people perceived? (Sasson & Morrison, 2019)
Disclosing autism diagnosis, and increased autism knowledge increases favourability ratings of autistic people
Autistic Traits and Friendship
- DSM-V diagnostic criteria for autism includes deficits in forming stable long-lasting relationships
- However, the DEP posits that this will only occur when each person has very different views and experiences
- Will dyads with similar levels of autistic traits report higher friendship quality? YES! (Bolis et al. 2021)
Enactive Mind intervention approach Klin (2000)
- social information might be less salient to autistic children which a knock-on effect on development
- Perhaps providing learning opportunities to autistic children early on in development could improve social and communication skills
The Transporters, Golan et al (2010)
- Video of trains with real emotion faces
- Acted out social situations
Predictable
Uses interests
Can be used by all autistic children - N=20 autistic children (4-7 years) watched everyday for 4 weeks
- Emotion vocabulary and recognition compared pre/post intervention
- Compared to no-intervention group (18 autistic and 18 non-autistic children) matched on age and IQ
- Children were asked to match the correct emotion face to the situation
- Used both emotions from the DVD, and new faces/contexts
- Autistic children in the intervention group significantly improved across all measures
- Whereas the control groups did not improve/change
Thomas the tank engine vs the transporters, Young & Poselt (2012)
- 13 autistic children watched the transporters for 3 weeks, and compared to 12 autistic children who watched Thomas the Tank Engine
- Autistic children who watched the transporters improved more in emotion recognition than children who watched Thomas
what is applied behaviour analysis?
- Intensive early intervention for autistic children
- Originally developed by Lovaas in 1987
- Follows behaviourist approaches using positive reinforcement to teach new skills and also repress “challenging behaviours”
- Followed for years on 1-2-1 basis for 20-50 hours/week
- Widely used, but is it effective, acceptable, useful to autistic people over the long term?
Systematic review and meta-analysis showed limited evidence in support of ABA (Rodgers et al. 2020)
- 20 studies included, but all were biased/poor quality
- Long term impact of the early interventions beyond 2 years was unknown
- Wide range of effect sizes
- Some evidence for positive effects on cognitive ability and adaptive behaviour (life skills, social and communication skills)
- Testimony of autistic adults who experienced ABA as children about potential harms not captured in research (McGill & Robinson, 2020)
- Kapp et al. 2019: Suppressing stimming removes a self-regulatory mechanism > feelings of not being accepted
Autism acceptance training
- 238 non-autistic adults completed: autism acceptance training, general mental health training not mentioning autism
no-training control - Survey assessed: Explicit autism knowledge, stigma, and impressions of autistic adults
implicit association task about autism - Non-autistic adults in the autism acceptance training condition reported: more positive impressions of autistic adults, fewer misconceptions and lower stigma about autism
endorsed higher expectations of autistic abilities expressed greater social interest in hypothetical and real autistic people - No effect on implicit biases:
non-autistic adults associating autism-related labels with unpleasant personal attributes regardless of training condition
