An asset or a deficit, presenting people with plausible frameworks seems to me to be one tool for getting round the social world that an autistic could make use of, once he or she gets a handle on how prone people are to fill in the blanks by invention so to speak. They might as well fill in the blanks your way rather than leaving this to blind chance or mere inclination. I am not suggesting that this framework be untrue to the person. Faking it never works for an autistic. But think how lovely it would be if people could be guided into thinking that you are amiable, helpful but shy and really prefer to be left alone and they do!

People are not only interested in using behaviors as symptoms of personality; they also want to make sense of behavior itself.

In the extreme case, severe autism may be characterized by almost no folk psychology (and thus mindblindness), but as autism and AS itself come by degrees, so different points on the autistic spectrum may involve degrees of deficit in folk psychology.

Results show that children with AS are impaired infolk psychology whilst being superior in folk physics. Future work needs to test if intuitive psychology and physics are truly independent of one another... or are inversely related to one another.

Previous work suggests children with autism show superior performance (in relation to their general mental age) on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). Frith interprets this as showing that they have "weak central coherence". In Experiment 1, using an adult level version of this task, we aimed to replicate and extend this finding, first, by collecting response time (RT) data; second, by testing adults with autism of normal intelligence; and third, by testing a group of adults with Asperger syndrome, in order to test for differences between autism and Asperger syndrome. Both clinical groups were significantly faster on the EFT. In Experiment 2, we investigated if this difference was due to a preference for local over global processing, using a novel drawing task based on the classical Rey Figure. The clinical groups did not differ significantly on this test, but there was a trend towards such a difference. Alternative explanations for the EFT superiority in autism and Asperger syndrome are considered.

Impairments of attention are among the most consistently reported cognitive deficits in autism, and they continue to be a key focus of research. This is in no doubt due to the importance of normal attention function to the development of many so-called "higher level" cognitive operations, and to the likely involvement of attention dysfunction in certain clinical features of autism. Autistic individuals display a wide range of attentional abilities and deficits across the many domains of attention function, including selective, sustained, spatial, and shifting attention operations. This unique pattern of attention function and dysfunction has profound implications for the development and treatment of autistic children. The present review will explore this pattern of attentional strengths and weaknesses and the neural defects that underlie them.

Two studies are reported that compare the descriptions given by children with and without autism of animated stimuli depicting mechanical launching effects, intentional reactions or sequences of mechanical and intentional reactions. Children were matched on chronological age, verbal mental age and IQ. The children with autism were as able as the control groups at differentiating mechanical launches from intentional reactions. Moreover, their descriptions of the longer action sequence were significantly different neither in length nor in their use of mental state language from those of the controls. However, finer-grained analyses of the accounts showed that the children with autism involved themselves more in the narrative than did control children. They also made less reference to episodes showing actions between animate objects, especially when the objects were not in contact. The implications of these findings for theories of autistic social dysfunction are discussed.

A prospective look at autism as a psychological phenomenon with an eye to logical modelling.

Using theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction, we show how weak coherence can be simulated in connectionist network that has unusually high inhibition compared to excitation.

Developmental research has considered the putative relationship between the ability to reverse an ambiguous figure (AF), and social metacognition (Theory of Mind) which both involve processing multiple representations. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) tend to fail ToM tasks. Recent research has attempted to determine whether children with ASD also experience difficulty with AF reversal.

The present thesis aims to gain more insight into the variability in autistic symptomatology. It tries to identify symptom domains that may underlie the autistic behaviors, and it examines the use of a particular cognitive processing style in autistic subjects, as predicted by the theory of a weak central coherence, that tries to give an explanation of why autistic subjects display these behaviors. First, the question arises whether the symptom structure of autism is represented by the triad of impaired behavior domains, as described in the DSM-IV-TR. Recently, studies suggested that the symptom structure that underlies the autism spectrum disorders differs from the triad of behavior domains of the DSM. These findings indicate that it is important to investigate symptom domains in autism further, in order to find out if the symptom structure differs from the DSM triad and if the symptom domains that are derived, can be replicated in a new and Dutch sample. Three studies in the present thesis focus on symptom domains in a large group of Dutch subjects with autistic symptomatology in varying degrees of severity. Second, two other studies in the present thesis focus on the cognitive processing style of subjects with disorders in the autism spectrum. By means of the influential theory of a weak central coherence in autism, autistic subjects are hypothesized to process information in a detail-focused manner. Evidence for this theory is not well established yet. The present thesis therefore examines the hypothesized detail-focused processing style in two groups of subjects with autism spectrum disorders: a group functioning in the lower IQ ranges, and a group functioning in the mild-to-normal IQ range.

Although the neurobiological understanding of autism has been increasing exponentially, the diagnosis of autism spectrum conditions still rests entirely on behavioural criteria. Autism is therefore most productively approached by a combination of biological and psychological theory. Psychologically, autism's triad of behavioural abnormalities in social function, communication, and restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests can be explained by an impaired capacity for empathizing, or modelling the mental states governing the behaviour of people, along with a superior capacity for systemizing, or inferring the rules governing the behaviour of objects. This empathizing-systemizing theory explains other psychological models such as impairments of executive function or central coherence, and may have a neurobiological basis in abnormally low activity of brain regions subserving social cognition along with abnormally high activity of regions subserving lower-level, perceptual processing, a pattern that may result from a skewed balance of local versus long-range functional connectivity.

Evidence is presented which indicate that these children spontaneously display only a fraction of their knowledge, disguising their real cognitive capacity by their autistic pattern of behaviour... No academic researcher can command the required knowledge of the individually specific autistic child to be able to extract the knowledge that the child does not voluntary reveal. Only full time workers with the child or someone who is prepared to invest months in close interaction with specific autistic children, can hope, with the utilization of intrusive techniques, to obtain anything like true assessments and measurements of their real knowledge and abilities, hidden behind their general and specific blocking behaviour. This is the reason that some parents and a few teachers have been successful with a few children, but interaction and success with all autistic children is possible, and their autistic pattern of behaviour can be overcome to a certain extent. Parents and teachers of autistic children should maintain hope, enthusiasm and high level of expectation.

Autistic weak central coherence is most clearly shown in (non-conscious) processing preference, which may reflect the relative cost of two types of processing (relatively global and meaningful versus relatively local and piece-meal).

This paper provides an overview of selective research on autism. Autism forms part of a spectrum of related developmental disorders that vary in severity. Both their prevalence and severity argue for concerted efforts aimed at improving our understanding and treatment of the many individuals affected. We begin by outlining an important discovery that implicates an early prenatal insult to the developing brain stem in at least some people with autism (hereafter, the thalidomide discovery; Miller & Stromland, 1993). Several lines of evidence consistent with this claim are summarized. We then turn to recent research on early developing mechanisms of attention and emotion in autism. Evidence to be reviewed points to impairment in the disengage function of visual attention, and data are provided on the relationship between disengagement and the regulation of emotional states. Research on emotion focuses on the hypothesis, derived from the thalidomide discovery, that there may be a physical/anatomical basis to the lack of facial expressiveness in autism. We end by discussing the implications of this work for future research and for supporting children and adults with autism.

Two groups of children with autistic-type behavior problems were compared to a group of normal children with respect to their autonomic response patterns observed during the performance of an attention-demanding task. Heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory activity were measured during periods of rest and of task performance. Applying a quantitative model of the baroreflex, we were able to demonstrate qualitative differences among the groups with respect to their vagally controlled response patterns, whereas sympathetic responsiveness did not differ. In terms of our model, the groups with autistic-type behavior showed a decrease in central vagal tone during task performance, while vagal gain appeared to be unaffected or even increased. In contrast, the children in the control group showed the expected pattern of a decrease in vagal gain while vagal tone appeared to be increased. Implications of our findings are discussed in the light of Damasio's somatic marking hypothesis.

Many authors have described a deficit of imitation of gestures and of symbolic and affective tasks in infants and young children with autism. This deficit is paradoxically associated with echolalia (atypical verbal imitation) and echopraxia (atypical gesture imitation) which in themselves appear to be excessive imitation. We have developed a brief clinical scale, the Imitation Disorders Evaluation scale (IDE scale), to evaluate these different early features of imitation disorders in autism. The present article reports (1) the validation study (interrater reliability, factor analysis) of the IDE scale carried out with a population of 30 infants and young children with autism aged from 10 to 46 months, and (2) the results of a follow-up study in which this scale was applied to a group of young children with autism (from 30 to 46 months) over 9 months' treatment. Factor analysis provided two factors: factor 1, called 'deficient imitation', comprising six items describing a deficit of facial, gestural, vocal and affective imitation; and factor 2, called 'atypical imitation', including echolalia, echopraxia and variability of imitation. The descriptive results of the follow-up study emphasize the sensitivity of the IDE scale for assessment of improvement in imitation disorders of early autism.

Autism may give us an important clue that the brain in fact allows at least two distinct kinds of conscious experience: consciousness of the physical (e.g.: seeing an object)... and consciousness of the mental (e.g.: thinking about seeing an object)...

The communication of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a qualitative impairment in verbal and non-verbal communication. In past decades a growing body of descriptive studies has appeared on language and communication problems in ASD. Reviews suggest that the development of formal and semantic aspects is relatively spared, whereas pragmatic skills are considered to be specifically impaired. This unique profile was interpreted mainly within the framework of the theory of mind hypothesis, which links the social-communicative problems of people with autism to an incapacity to attribute mental states to themselves and others.

Such is the tendency to focus on parts rather than wholes that, if and when the surrounding context of a figure is potentially misleading or confusing, they may actually find it easier than normal people to ignore the context and see through it.

Writings by and about leading thinkers in cognitive science, and critics and observers of the philosophy of mind.

The objective of this prospective study was to evaluate the possible role of two cognitive styles - weak central coherence and poor cognitive shifting - in predicting social improvement in patients with autistic disorder.

Children with a diagnosis of autism and typically developing children were given two variations of the Navon task (Navon, 1977), which required responding to a target that could appear at the global level, the local level, or both levels. In one variation, the divided attention task, no information was given to children regarding the level at which a target would appear on any one trial. In the other, the selective attention task, children were instructed to attend to either the local or the global level. Typically developing children made most errors when the target appeared at the local level whereas children with autism made more errors when the target appeared at the global level in the divided attention task. Both groups of children were quicker to respond to the global target than the local target in the selective attention task. The presence of normal global processing in the children with autism in one task but not in the other is discussed in terms of a deficit in mechanisms that inhibit local information in the absence of overt priming or voluntary selective attention to local information.

Reviews theory and research on the development of children's knowledge about the mental world, focusing especially on work done during the past 15 years under the rubric of theory-of-mind development.

Cognitive linguistics assumes that language develops by metaphorical extension. Basic bodily experiences, such as moving in space, seeing people and handling objects, provide the foundations of language.

In order to explain the cognitive and cerebral mechanisms responsible for the visuospatial peak in autism, and to document its specificity to this condition, a group of eight high-functioning individuals with autism and a visuospatial peak (HFA-P) performed a modified block-design task (BDT; subtest from Wechsler scales) at various levels of perceptual cohesiveness, as well as tasks tapping visuomotor speed, global perception, visual memory, visual search and speed of visual encoding. Their performance was compared with that of 8 autistics without a visuospatial peak (HFA-NP), 10 typically developing individuals (TD) and 8 gifted comparison participants with a visuospatial peak (TD-P). Both HFA-P and HFA-NP groups presented with diminished detrimental influence of increasing perceptual coherence compared with their BDT-matched comparison groups. Neither autistic group displayed a deficit in construction of global representations. The HFA-P group showed no differences in performance level or profile in comparison with the gifted BDT-matched [i.e. higher full-scale IQ (FSIQ)] group, apart from locally oriented perception. Diminished detrimental influence of perceptual coherence on BDT performance is both sensitive and specific to autism, and superior low-level processing interacts with locally oriented bias to produce outstanding BDT performance in a subgroup of autistic individuals. Locally oriented processing, enhanced performance in multiple tasks relying on detection of simple visual material and enhanced discrimination of first-order gratings converge towards an enhanced functioning and role of the primary visual cortex (V1) in autism. In contrast, superior or typical performance of autistics in tasks requiring global processing is inconsistent with the global-deficit-driven Weak Central Coherence hypothesis and its neurobiological magnocellular deficit counterpart.

Dissociation between verbal and visual-perceptual skills among older children and specific association of discrepantly high nonverbal skills with increased social symptoms, suggest that the nonverbal profile may index an etiologically significant subtype.

The problem with Martians is defining their behaviour. We may suspect that they are saying something to us as they blow gently in the wind. Perhaps the swirling of ammonia through their many tubules is their way of thinking.

Electronic archive for papers in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science, Biology, Philosophy, related to cognition.

The use and understanding of self-presentational display rules (SPDRs) was investigated in 21 children with high-functioning autism (HFA), 18 children with Asperger's disorder (AspD) and 20 typically developing (TD) children (all male, aged 4- to 11-years, matched on mental age). Their behaviour was coded during a deception scenario to assess use of SPDRs; understanding of SPDRs was assessed via three real/apparent emotion-understanding vignettes. The children with HFA and AspD used less effective SPDRs than the TD children, but there were no group differences in understanding SPDRs. The children with HFA and AspD did not differ on their use or understanding of SPDRs, and the results are discussed in relation to the similarities and differences between these diagnostic conditions.

Language impairment is a defining feature of autism. However, remarkably little work has been done to determine the exact nature of the impairment or its underlying cause(s), and studies of the spontaneous language of people with autism are particularly rare. The immediate aim of the study is to test the broad hypothesis that concept formation, and hence vocabulary, is abnormal in autism.

A computational consideration in disorders such as autism and dyslexia suggested that one interpretation of this claim is in terms of networks with too few internal processing units to acquire a domain of a given complexity.

There appears to be a relative lack of the normal consciousness of the mental n the majority of cases with autism. This finding has the potential to explain the social, communicative, and imaginative abnormalities that are diagnostic of the condition...

It is argued that society is a crucial factor in the construction of individual intelligence. In other words that it is important that intelligence is socially situated in an analogous way to the physical situation o f robots.

A tour of the human cerebral cortex

Sometimes getting information into or out of my head is like a very long conveyor belt. I set a package onto the conveyor belt, and it starts moving. But when it will get there, who knows. There are things I set on that conveyor belt five, ten, even fifteen years ago that haven't reached their destinations yet.

The objective of this study was to explore factors that affect the difficulty of counterfactual reasoning in 3-5-year-old children and to shed light on the reason why counterfactual reasoning relates to understanding false belief.

Culture refers to shared patterns of human behaviour. Autism affects the ways that individuals eat, dress, work spend leisure time, understand their world, communicate, etc. Thus, in a sense, autism functions as a culture.

The aim of this study was to examine executive functioning, in particular, attentional set-shifting deficits in high-functioning autism (n = 12) and Asperger's disorder (n = 12). A large or global digit composed of smaller or local digits was presented during each trial. The participants indicated the presence of 1s or 2s by pressing the appropriate button. These targets could appear globally or locally. Relative to IQ, sex and age matched controls, reaction time to global targets in individuals with autism was retarded when the previous target appeared locally. This deficiency in shifting from local to global processing, however, was not observed in individuals with Asperger's disorder. The theoretical and neurobiological significance of this dissociation in executive functioning in these clinically related disorders was explored.

Interest regarding neural information processing in autism is growing because atypical perceptual abilities are a characteristic feature of persons with autism. Central to our review is how characteristic perceptual abilities, referred to as perceptual signatures, can be used to suggest a neural etiology that is specific to autism. We review evidence from studies assessing both motion and form perception and how the resulting perceptual signatures are interpreted within the context of two main hypotheses regarding information processing in autism: the pathway- and complexity-specific hypotheses. We present evidence suggesting that an autism-specific neural etiology based on perceptual abilities can only be made when particular experimental paradigms are used, and that such an etiology is most congruent with the complexity-specific hypothesis.

I have postulated that a deficit in x, being one of the processing and reasoning principles by means of which a 'control mechanism' operates with information, is probably the core problem in autism.

This paper stresses the need to assess various aspects of attention and frontal/executive functions that are often not sufficiently emphasized in the practice of clinical neuropsychology, yet are a critical component to any educational or rehabilitation intervention. A review of such functions with an emphasis on providing a developmental and cross-cultural context to their evaluation is offered.

Subjects were asked to judge whether an artifact that was made for one purpose (e.g. making tea) and was currently being used for another purpose (e.g. watering flowers) was a teapot or a watering can.

It's not just abstractions that I perceive differently. For instance, I am well aware now that I perceive music, and respond to it mentally and emotionally, very differently than most people do. I can experience epiphanies while listening to certain kinds of music, or even, sometimes, while replaying music in my memory (I have a musical track going in my head most of the time). But I also find some other kinds of music--unfortunately much of it quite popular--very agitating or annoying in a way that most people don't. There are smells and tastes that I perceive differently than other people, too. I sometimes smell things that other people don't smell, or perceive strong emotions as odors. And I like to eat raw garlic...

In the absence of language, I was picking up on the emotional and social dynamics with possibly more acuity than a non-autistic person would. I have noticed this before. If I had been both willing and able to follow the conversation, I doubt I would have picked up on those other things. And I doubt that the other things are what are measured when non-autistic people try to measure autistic people's "social awareness".

A tendency to focus on details at the expense of configural information, 'weak coherence', has been proposed as a cognitive style in autism. In the present study we tested whether weak coherence might be the result of executive dysfunction, by testing clinical groups known to show deficits on tests of executive control.

Eight low-functioning and non-verbal children with autism were presented with a modified version of the 'still face' paradigm (still face/imitative interaction/still face) performed by a stranger. The children's reactions illustrate the development of expectancies concerning human social behaviour. While they ignored the stranger and did not show any concern about her odd behaviour during the first still episode, they all focused on the adult during the second still episode. In this episode, they exhibited a mixed social pattern of positive overtures and negative emotional expressions which resembles the still face effect found in normally developing infants. These findings suggest that low-functioning children with autism are able to integrate their previous experience with a partner and detect social contingency, but that they are not able to form a generalized expectancy for social contingency in human beings with whom they have not yet had contact. This may explain why they generally ignore strangers.

The authors propose that an individual’s superior ability to detect, match, and reproduce simple visual elements allows them to perform better in tasks relying on detection and graphic reproduction of visual elements that are included in a map. Individuals with autism appear to discriminate, detect, and memorize simple visual patterns better than typical individuals, which may account for their superior performance in visual-spatial tasks that rely on recognizing and memorizing landmarks or detecting similarities between a map and landmark features. Thus, in non-social settings, children with HFA and Asperger syndrome have superior spatial abilities than typically developing individuals, which has been seen in other similar studies of visual-spatial tests in these individuals.

It appeared that the reaction times of the in-patient group were about two times as slow as the norm group in the difficult cognitive condition, which is indicative for a divided attention problem.

This study examined the effect of exemplar typicality on reaction time and accuracy of categorization. High-functioning children (age 9-12), adolescents (age 13-16), and adults with autism (age 17-48) and matched controls were tested in a category verification procedure. All groups showed improved processing throughout the lifespan for typical and somewhat typical category exemplars. However, individuals with autism responded more slowly than matched controls to atypical exemplars at all ages. The results are discussed in terms of potential differences in the type of processing that may be required for categorizing typical and atypical category exemplars. Parallels are also drawn to the results of previous studies on face processing in individuals with autism.

People in the general population are typically very poor at detecting changes in pictures of complex scenes. The degree of this 'change blindness', however, varies with the content of the scene: when an object is semantically important or contextually inappropriate, people may be more effective at detecting changes. Two experiments investigated change blindness in people with autism, who are known from previous research to be efficient in detecting features yet poor at processing stimuli for meaning and context. The first experiment measured the effect of semantic information while the second investigated the role of context in directing attention. In each task, participants detected the dissimilarity between pairs of images. Both groups showed a main effect of image type in both experimental tasks, showing that their attention was directed to semantically meaningful and contextually inappropriate items. However, the autistic group also showed a greater difficulty detecting changes to semantically marginal items in the first experiment. Conclusions point to a normal selection of items for attention in people with autism spectrum disorders, although this may be combined with difficulty switching or disengaging attention.

Social stereotypes provide a cognitively "inexpensive" if often inaccurate way to predict the behavior of others. We found that in spite of autistic children’s profound impairment in the ability to predict behavior on the basis of an individual’s mental state, they were just as likely as young normal children to use stereotypes to predict outcomes of novel situations. This finding is surprising only if one assumes that the ability to explain the behavior of others relies on a single mechanism. Our findings suggest that there are two distinct cognitive capacities, one that makes sense of others’ behavior in terms of psychological states (Theory of Mind) and another in terms of social group membership (Naïve Sociology). Theory of Mind but not Naive Sociology is impaired in autism. This is a hitherto unsuspected islet of social ability in autism.

Does movement of the eyes in one or another direction function as an automatic attentional cue to a location of interest? Two experiments explored the directional movement of the eyes in a full face for speed of detection of an aftercoming location target in young people with autism and in control participants.

Innate modularity is the big question for cognitive neuroscience. One proposal is that a ‘theory of mind’ is a species-specific (human) example of an innate module. The evidence from the genetic, neurodevelopmental, psychiatric condition of autism is considered, to examine if the innate modularity claim is justified. At the opposite extreme, explanations of autism in terms of deficits in a general learning mechanism are considered. It is concluded that both of these extreme positions may be untenable, and instead there may be some justification for an intermediate model of social perception: minimalist innate modularity.

Autism is a developmental disorder that is usually diagnosed when children reach their third or fourth year. Although the full range of symptoms does not appear until this gae, parents are often aware of difficulties much earlier in their childs development. Of the early difficulties reported, one of the most predictive for diagnosis of autism is the impairment in joint attention - the ability to coordinate attention between people and objects. This research investigates the relationship between this problem and the more basic difficulty of orienting attention to people.

Early imitation is not related to gaze following. Instead, auditory and visual attention were related to gaze following. Infants tended to pass gaze following first, then auditory attention, and then visual attention.

An experiment was devised to test the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory of autism. Three groups of participants took part in the study: males with Asperger Syndrome (AS) (n = 18), males without AS, (n = 44) and females from the general population (n = 45). Each participant completed two tasks: one that involved empathising and another that involved systemising. On the empathising task, females scored significantly higher than control males who in turn scored higher than males with AS. Conversely, females scored significantly lower than both male groups on the systemising task, who did not differ significantly from each other. These results are in line with both the E-S theory of autism and the 'extreme male brain' theory of autism. Alternative explanations of the results are also explored, including an interpretation through the idea of open and closed systems.

Normative-IQ individuals with autism are capable of solving explicit social cognitive problems at a level that is not matched by their ability to meet the demands of everyday social situations. The magnitude of this discrepancy is now being documented through newer techniques such as eye tracking, which allows us to see and measure how individuals with autism search for meaning when presented with naturalistic social scenes.

Visuo-perceptual processing in autism is characterized by intact or enhanced performance on static spatial tasks and inferior performance on dynamic tasks, suggesting a deficit of dorsal visual stream processing in autism. However, previous findings by Bertone et al. indicate that neuro-integrative mechanisms used to detect complex motion, rather than motion perception per se, may be impaired in autism. We present here the first demonstration of concurrent enhanced and decreased performance in autism on the same visuo-spatial static task, wherein the only factor dichotomizing performance was the neural complexity required to discriminate grating orientation. The ability of persons with autism was found to be superior for identifying the orientation of simple, luminance-defined (or first-order) gratings but inferior for complex, texture-defined (or second-order) gratings. Using a flicker contrast sensitivity task, we demonstrated that this finding is probably not due to abnormal information processing at a sub-cortical level (magnocellular and parvocellular functioning). Together, these findings are interpreted as a clear indication of altered low-level perceptual information processing in autism, and confirm that the deficits and assets observed in autistic visual perception are contingent on the complexity of the neural network required to process a given type of visual stimulus. We suggest that atypical neural connectivity, resulting in enhanced lateral inhibition, may account for both enhanced and decreased low-level information processing in autism.

Visuo-perceptual processing in autism is characterized by intact or enhanced performance on static spatial tasks and inferior performance on dynamic tasks, suggesting a deficit of dorsal visual stream processing in autism. However, previous findings by Bertone et al. indicate that neuro-integrative mechanisms used to detect complex motion, rather than motion perception per se, may be impaired in autism. We present here the first demonstration of concurrent enhanced and decreased performance in autism on the same visuo-spatial static task, wherein the only factor dichotomizing performance was the neural complexity required to discriminate grating orientation. The ability of persons with autism was found to be superior for identifying the orientation of simple, luminance-defined (or first-order) gratings but inferior for complex, texture-defined (or second-order) gratings. Using a flicker contrast sensitivity task, we demonstrated that this finding is probably not due to abnormal information processing at a sub-cortical level (magnocellular and parvocellular functioning). Together, these findings are interpreted as a clear indication of altered low-level perceptual information processing in autism, and confirm that the deficits and assets observed in autistic visual perception are contingent on the complexity of the neural network required to process a given type of visual stimulus. We suggest that atypical neural connectivity, resulting in enhanced lateral inhibition, may account for both enhanced and decreased low-level information processing in autism.

High-functioning adults with autism and control adults were tested on a perceptual learning task that compared discrimination performance on familiar and novel stimuli. Control adults were better able to discriminate familiar than novel stimuli--the perceptual learning effect. No perceptual learning effect was observed in adults with autism although they discriminated the novel stimuli significantly better than control adults. This enhanced discrimination learning about novel, but not familiar, stimuli in autism is discussed in relation to two current hypotheses of information processing in autism--weak central coherence and reduced attention-switching--and a new third hypothesis, which suggests that features held in common between stimuli are processed poorly and features unique to a stimulus are processed well in autism.

Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind.

In summary, this chapter has reviewed both the early mindblindness theory of autism, and the more recent extensions of these: the empathising-systemising theory, and the extreme male brain theory, of autism. The first of these extensions addresses a problem that the early theory had, namely, needing to also account for the obsessional features of autism. The second of these may help explain the marked sex ratio in autism and throw light on the biological basis of autism. Both of these extensions lead to new predictions when contrasted with other cognitive developmental theories of this condition, and illustrate some of the progress that is being made in this part of the field of developmental psychopathology.

Both autism and schizophrenia involve difficulties in comprehending mental states (mentalising), as measured by now-standard tests such as false-belief tests and story-sequencing.

Why then do autistics have such difficulty in understanding and producing narratives involving people who act for reasons? Perhaps this is explained by an inability to recognise that there are other perspectives.

Many philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that our everyday or 'folk' understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called 'folk psychology' (sometimes 'commonsense' psychology).

Human beings are able to use the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological causes of the behavior of others, typically by making decisions within a pretend context.

The theory of weak central coherence 'starts working' at the next stage of the process of perception when gestalt perception inevitably leads to distortions and fragmentation, in order to limit the amount of information to be processed.

Whilst normal processing has been found to be characterised by a global advantage, autism as been characterised as a bias towards local processing. Typically this has been assessed using global/local stimuli for which a place relationship holds between local elements. The present study examined the perception of gestalt stimuli for which nature relationships hold between the local elements.

This review has touched on selected hot topic issues in autism research. There are other exciting developments in the field, including advances in neuroimaging and genetics. Such advances notwithstanding, an understanding of the social and cognitive features of autism reviewed here has great importance. For example, research in our laboratory is focused on identifying factors that may underlie the JA deficit in autism. A better understanding of these factors would improve predictions about the presentation of the disorder in early infancy, as well as better target interventions on pivotal skills and behaviors. In addition to implications for research, concepts such as JA, ToM, EF, and central coherence can help health care providers develop a fuller picture of both the strengths and impairments that characterize autism spectrum disorders. This can help providers better understand autism not as a collection of isolated symptoms, but as a description of a population of children with syndrome-specific strengths and weakness.

Four aspects seem core. The social aspect reigns almost supremely in accounts of autism concerned with diagnosis and treatment; the perception aspect, central in self-reports of high-functioning people with autism; narrative and literalness.

We see the outline of a natural structure or mechanism in the mind -- namely, we see the existence in the normal mind of a mechanism for mindreading, brought into sharp relief by its absence in degrees in children with autism.

Childhood pretend play and adult creative thinking and problem-solving share the same cognitive basis, namely the capacity to generate an initial supposition, and to think and reason within its scope.

In autism, when failures of neural connectivity impede narrative linkage, when each element of a scene or a story exists in isolation, the surrounding world can seem threateningly intractable. Autistic withdrawal into repetitive behaviours and scripted interactions can be read as an effort to gain control over such arbitrariness and unpredictability. In this regard, people with autism differ from other human beings only in the degree of concreteness with which this problem of control is approached: the tension between our mortal nature and our capacity to contemplate the eternal makes us desperate to impute narrative order and authorial intent in a universe where there may be only chaos and arbitrariness, and is what drives us as artists and scientists to construct themes within which our observations and experiences can be represented, and therefore realised. In this regard, people with autism can be described as "human, but more so" - for we all are driven by the same desperation to control or at least to predict what is going to happen to us, to keep chaos, entropy, and death at bay. The study of autism has much to tell us about theories of normal neural and psychological development, and about the nature of human cognition and literary representation.

This paper presents evidence for two kinds of subtypes in autism that are defined on the basis of language profiles and on the basis of cognitive profiles.

idiolect n. : the linguistic system of one person, differing in some details from that of all other speakers of the same dialect or language

The present study sought to examine the specificity, developmental correlates, nature and pervasiveness of imitation deficits very early in the development of autism. Subjects were 24 children with autism (mean age 34 months), 18 children with fragile X syndrome, 20 children with other developmental disorders, and 15 typically-developing children. Tasks included manual, oral-facial, and object oriented imitations, developmental measures, joint attention ability, and motor abilities. Children with autism were found to be significantly more impaired in overall imitation abilities, oral-facial imitation, and imitations of actions on objects than children in all of the other groups. Imitation skills of young children with fragile X syndrome were strongly influenced by the absence or presence of symptoms of autism. For children with autism, imitation skills were strongly correlated with autistic symptoms and joint attention, even when controlling for developmental level. For comparison groups, imitation was related to other developmental abilities including play, language, and visual spatial skills. Neither motor functioning nor social responsivity accounted for a significant amount of variance in imitation scores, when controlling for overall developmental level, which accounted for much of the variation in imitation ability. Simple imitation skills were differentially impaired in young children with autism, and lack of social cooperation did not account for their poor performance. In autism, imitation skills clustered with dyadic and triadic social interactions and overall developmental level, but were not related to play or language development. For comparison children, all these areas were inter-related. Hypotheses about a specific dyspraxic deficit underlying the imitation performance in autism were not supported.

Engagement is a core component of effective educational programs for children with autism. Analysis of 711 naturalistic goal-directed classroom behaviors of four school-age children with autism and four comparable children with Down syndrome (DS) was conducted. The definition of engagement was expanded to include child compliance and congruence. A main finding was both child and environmental factors influenced type of engagement. Children with DS produced 20% more goal-directed behaviors that were both congruent and compliant compared to children with autism. Large group instruction was associated with less congruent engagement but more compliant engagement for children with autism. These findings suggest specific types of engagement which may lead to advances in developing evidence-based practices for specific developmental disorders.

In this essay, we review developments in infancy research and cognitive neuroscience. We follow each selective review with a critical analysis, in an attempt to show how thinking in these fields follows or diverges from Dennett’s influential intentional stance. We close by attempting to incorporate some of these findings into Dennett’s larger program of explaining our kind of mind. First, however, we attempt to clarify some of the differences between the intentional stance, folk psychology, and theory of mind, as we see them.

The present study investigated the influence of developmental level on interaction and imitation in infants and young children with autism on the basis of family videos and filmed consultation. The sample comprised 18 children with autism divided into groups according to their developmental quotient (DQ > 50 and DQ < 50). A quantitative evaluation was performed on video observations at four periods (10-12 months, 16-18 months, 24-26 months, after 4 years) using scales appropriate for the evaluation of interaction and imitation impairments. The findings showed that, at a very early age, infants later diagnosed as having autistic disorder show different intensities of interaction and imitation deficits according to developmental level.

If thoughts and concepts can exist in creatures that do not use language, then Davidson's argument that animals cannot have thoughts because they lack language is unsound.

If you look at autism from the outside and you remain an outsider, you may see many bizarre things: autistic children repeat things literally, they imitate our behaviours literally, they have repetitive behaviours, they make very concrete associations instead of thinking in a flexible way, they have difficulties in understanding our emotions. You may say, from time to time, that this child is being naughty: he doesn’t do what I ask him to do. But if you really try to get inside the child’s mind, to see the world through his eyes, you very often see that it is not that he does not want to do what you want but that he understands the world differently. He makes hypotheses.

These findings support the argument that cognitive development is domain-specific and highlight the need for further research in this area.

Results demonstrated that children with autism preferred to employ physical causality when reasoning about novel physical and psychological events. Furthermore, their performance on a multiple-choice task confirmed their impairment in intuitive psychology whilst highlighting a superior ability to reason about physical phenomena in relation to all other comparison groups.

The re-description of social information into basic information-processing computations may prove to be a powerful tool. We mention examples in the context of autism, but it is easy to see how the logic can generalize to typical development.

Throughout this chapter I consider the extent to which autism provides a window onto alternative ways in which mind and language may become connected over the course of development.

Evidence from the Global Integration test suggests that in comparison to their normal controls the clinical groups were less able to integrate sentences with each other and with the theme to provide the most coherent arrangement of the sentences.

Results suggest that individuals with an autism spectrum condition are impaired in achieving local coherence, and they have a preference not to strive for coherence unless instructed to do so, or unless they make a conscious decision to do so.

In the present study, copying tasks were used to assess hierarchical aspects of visual perception in a group of 10 nonsavant autistic individuals with normal intelligence. In Experiment 1, the hierarchical order of graphic construction and the constancy of this order were measured for the copying of objects and nonobjects. In comparison to control participants, autistic individuals produced more local features at the start of the copying. However, they did not differ from controls with respect to graphic constancy. Experiment 2 measured the effect of geometrical impossibility on the copying of figures. Results revealed that autistic individuals were less affected by figure impossibility than were controls. Therefore, these experiments seem to support the notion of a local bias for visual information processing in individuals with autism. Two interpretations are proposed to account for this effect. According to the hierarchical deficit hypothesis, individuals with autism do not manifest the normal global bias in perceiving scenes and objects. Alternatively, the executive function hypothesis suggests that autism brings about limitations in the complexity of information that can be manipulated in short-term visual memory during graphic planning.

According to predictions from the Weak Central Coherence theory for perceptual processing, persons with autism should display a tendency to focus on minute details rather than on a more general picture. However, the evidence for this theory is not consistent with findings of an enhanced detection of local targets, but a typical global bias. Adolescents with high-functioning autism and CA- (approximately 15 years) and IQ- (approximately 105-110) matched typically developing adolescents were administered a series of global-local visual tasks, including a traditional task of hierarchical processing, three tasks of configural processing, and a disembedding task that involved rapid perceptual processing. No group differences were found on either the traditional task of hierarchical processing or on tasks of configural processing. However, group differences were found on the disembedding task as the search for embedded, in relation to isolated stimuli, was slower for the typically developing adolescents but similar for the participants with autism. These findings are consistent with other reports of superior performance in detecting embedded figures, but typical performance in global and configural processing among persons with high-functioning autism. Thus, the notions of local bias and global impairment that are part of WCC may need to be reexamined.

We describe 3 cases of very high functioning individuals with Asperger Syndrome, two of whom are university students (in physics and computer science, respectively), and the third a professor of mathematics, and winner of the Field Medal (equivalent to the Nobel Prize). The interest in these cases is whether there is a social-cognitive deficit, given their self-evident academic achievements. Such cases provide a rare opportunity to test for dissociations of cognitive skills, since these cases possess exceptionally high ability. These 3 individuals were given one test of folk psychology, one test of folk physics, and one test of executive function. All three cases showed deficits on the adult level ‘theory of mind’ (folk psychology) test involving reading mental states from photographs of the eyes, whilst showing no deficits on a control task of judging gender from the same photographs. In addition, all 3 cases were at ceiling on the test of folk physics, and on the most complex test of executive function (the Tower of Hanoi). 14 control subjects clarified normative performance on the folk psychology and folk physics tests. These results strongly suggest theory of mind (folk psychology) is independent of both IQ, executive function, and reasoning about the physical world.