Matching strategies in cognitive research with individuals with high-functioning autism: current practices, instrument biases, and recommendations

Understanding of emotional experience in autism: insights from the personal accounts of high-functioning children with autism

In this study, the authors investigate emotional understanding in autism through a discourse analytic framework to provide a window into children's strategies for interpreting emotional versus nonemotional encounters and consider the implications for the mechanisms underlying emotional understanding in typical development. Accounts were analyzed for thematic content and discourse structure. Whereas high-functioning children with autism were able to discuss contextually appropriate accounts of simple emotions, their strategies for interpreting all types of emotional (but not nonemotional) experiences differed from those used by typically developing children. High-functioning children with autism were less inclined to organize their emotional accounts in personalized causal-explanatory frameworks and displayed a tendency to describe visually salient elements of experiences seldom observed among comparison children. Findings suggest that children with autism possess less coherent representations of emotional experiences and use alternative strategies for interpreting emotionally evocative encounters. Discussion focuses on the significance of these findings for informing the nature of emotional dysfunction in autism as well as implications for theories of emotional understanding in typical development.

Enhanced perceptual functioning in autism: an update, and eight principles of autistic perception

We propose an "Enhanced Perceptual Functioning" model encompassing the main differences between autistic and non-autistic social and non-social perceptual processing: locally oriented visual and auditory perception, enhanced low-level discrimination, use of a more posterior network in "complex" visual tasks, enhanced perception of first order static stimuli, diminished perception of complex movement, autonomy of low-level information processing toward higher-order operations, and differential relation between perception and general intelligence. Increased perceptual expertise may be implicated in the choice of special ability in savant autistics, and in the variability of apparent presentations within PDD (autism with and without typical speech, Asperger syndrome) in non-savant autistics. The overfunctioning of brain regions typically involved in primary perceptual functions may explain the autistic perceptual endophenotype.

Young people with intellectual disabilities attending mainstream and segregated schooling: perceived stigma, social comparison and future aspirations

BACKGROUND

Mainstream schooling is a key policy in the promotion of social inclusion of young people with learning disabilities. Yet there is limited evidence about the school experience of young people about to leave mainstream as compared with segregated education, and how it impacts on their relative view of self and future aspirations.

METHODS

Sixty young people with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities in their final year of secondary school participated in this study. Twenty-eight individuals came from mainstream schools and 32 attended segregated school. They completed a series of self-report measures on perceptions of stigma, social comparison to a more disabled and non-disabled peer and the likelihood involved in attaining their future goals.

RESULTS

The majority of participants from both groups reported experiencing stigmatized treatment in the local area where they lived. The mainstream group reported significant additional stigma at school. In terms of social comparisons, both groups compared themselves positively with a more disabled peer and with a non-disabled peer. While the mainstream pupils had more ambitious work-related aspirations, both groups felt it equally likely that they would attain their future goals. Although the participants from segregated schools came from significantly more deprived areas and had lower scores on tests of cognitive functioning, neither of these factors appeared to have an impact on their experience of stigma, social comparisons or future aspirations.

CONCLUSIONS

Irrespective of schooling environment, the young people appeared to be able to cope with the threats to their identities and retained a sense of optimism about their future. Nevertheless, negative treatment reported by the children was a serious source of concern and there is a need for schools to promote the emotional well-being of pupils with intellectual disabilities.

Bootstrapping conceptual deduction using physical connection: rethinking frontal cortex

The age at which infants can demonstrate the ability to deduce abstract rules can be reduced by more than half, from 21 months to 9 months. The key is to introduce a physical connection between the items to be conceptually related. I argue here that making the same change in how items are presented might also help some preschoolers with learning delays, especially some children with autism. I also suggest that the roles of premotor and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices in deducing abstract rules might have been misinterpreted behaviorally and anatomically. The crucial brain region may be the periarcuate, which partially overlaps both premotor and lateral prefrontal cortex. The cognitive ability made possible by this region might be something far more elementary than previously considered: the ability to perceive conceptual connections in the absence of physical connection.

Multiple cognitive capabilities/deficits in children with an autism spectrum disorder: “Weak” central coherence and its relationship to theory of mind and executive control

This study examined the validity of "weak" central coherence (CC) in the context of multiple cognitive capabilities/deficits in autism. Children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and matched typically developing children were administered tasks tapping visuospatial coherence, false-belief understanding and aspects of executive control. Significant group differences were found in all three cognitive domains. Evidence of local processing on coherence tasks was widespread in the ASD group, but difficulties in attributing false beliefs and in components of executive functioning were present in fewer of the children with ASD. This cognitive profile was generally similar for younger and older children with ASD. Furthermore, weak CC was unrelated to false-belief understanding, but aspects of coherence (related to integration) were associated with aspects of executive control. Few associations were found between cognitive variables and indices of autistic symptomatology. Implications for CC theory are discussed.

Global–Local Visual Processing in High Functioning Children with Autism: Structural vs. Implicit Task Biases

Global-local processing was examined in high-functioning children with autism and in groups of typically developing children. In experiment 1, the effects of structural bias were tested by comparing visual search that favored access to either local or global targets. The children with autism were not unusually sensitive to either level of visual structure. In experiment 2 a structural global bias was pitted against an implicit task bias favoring the local level. Children with autism were least sensitive to the structural global bias but showed greater sensitivity to the implicit task bias. This suggests that autism is associated with differences in the executive control processes used to guide attention to either the global or local level, and strategies may be more "data driven".

Current trends in psychological research on children with high-functioning autism and Asperger disorder

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

This review explores current trends in the literature during 2004 on psychological studies of children with high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome. Studies are reviewed that examine diagnostic dilemmas and methodological concerns, cognitive and social deficits, and interventions.

RECENT FINDINGS

There is considerable debate over the distinction between high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome, but few studies find support for separate disorders. Most studies reviewed combine high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome into an autism spectrum disorder group or study only one diagnostic group, either high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome. Research into cognitive processes (specifically mentalizing) and social understanding (nonliteral language) continue to dominate research efforts. Current studies suggest specific weaknesses in many areas of nonliteral language, such as humor, irony, and teasing. Studies rely heavily on current theoretical explanations for deficits, namely the central coherence, social inference, and executive function theories, and varying levels of support were found for all three theories. Intervention and outcome studies lag behind experimental and theoretical studies, but two studies employed scientifically rigorous intervention designs with promising results.

SUMMARY

Children with high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome have a great deal of potential with respect to long-term developmental outcomes, and yet they continue to be understudied and under-served in current intervention programs. Future studies are needed in developmental processes and outcomes in this population, and in the development of effective treatment strategies that have undergone scientifically rigorous testing.

Atypical sleep architecture and the autism phenotype

A growing body of evidence indicates that people with autism frequently experience sleep disorders and exhibit atypical sleep architecture. In order to establish whether sleep disorders truly belong to the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) phenotype, we conducted a subjective and objective study of sleep in a group of high-functioning adults with ASD but without sleep complaints, psychiatric disorders or neurological comorbidity. We compared the subjective data of 27 ASD participants with those of 78 healthy controls matched for chronological age and gender. Subjective measures of sleep in the clinical group were compatible with insomnia and/or a tolerable phase advance of the sleep-wake cycle. Subjective data were confirmed by objective laboratory sleep recordings in a subset of 16 patients and 16 controls. Persons with autism presented with a longer sleep latency (P < 0.04), more frequent nocturnal awakenings (P < 0.03), lower sleep efficiency (P < 0.03), increased duration of stage 1 sleep (P < 0.02), decreased non-REM sleep (stages 2 + 3 + 4, P < 0.04) and slow-wave sleep (stages 3 + 4, P < 0.05), fewer stage 2 EEG sleep spindles (P < 0.004), and a lower number of rapid eye movements during REM sleep (P < 0.006) than did control participants. On clinical scales, the scores of persons with ASD on the Beck Depression Inventory were similar to those of persons without, but their trait anxiety scores on the Spielberger Anxiety Scale were higher (P < 0.02). The state anxiety scores of the Spielberger scale and cortisol levels were the same in the two groups. Objective total sleep time correlated negatively with the Social (-0.52, P < 0.05) and Communication (-0.54, P < 0.02) scales of the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised. The sleep of clinical subgroups (10 with high-functioning autism, six with Asperger syndrome) did not differ, except for the presence of fewer EEG sleep spindles in the Asperger syndrome subgroup (P < 0.05). In conclusion, these findings indicate that atypicalities of sleep constitute a salient feature of the adult ASD phenotype and this should be further investigated in younger patients. Moreover, the results are consistent with an atypical organization of neural networks subserving the macro- and microstructure of sleep in ASD. We are furthering this research with quantified analysis of sleep EEG.