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Query: UMLS:C0004352 (autism)
 32,579 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The hypothesis that autistic people have impaired metarepresentational ability (and, as one result, lack a 'theory of mind') is described in the context of other psychological work concerning the development and function of the human mind. Evidence for the hypothesis is outlined and evaluated. The claim that impaired metarepresentational ability underlies the social, communicative and imaginative deficits of autism (see paper by Uta Frith in this issue) is discussed. It is concluded that impaired metarepresentational ability is unlikely to be the primary, or fundamental, behavioural difficulty in autism, but that the hypothesis provides an important new way of looking at and understanding autistic behaviour.
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PMID:The theory of mind hypothesis of autism: explanation, evidence and assessment. 260 11

Uta Frith has made a major contribution to our understanding of developmental disorders, especially autism and dyslexia. She has studied the cognitive and neurobiological bases of both disorders and demonstrated distinctive impairments in social cognition and central coherence in autism, and in phonological processing in dyslexia. In this enterprise she has encouraged psychologists to work in a theoretical framework that distinguishes between observed behaviour and the underlying cognitive and neurobiological processes that mediate that behaviour.
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PMID:Forty years on: Uta Frith's contribution to research on autism and dyslexia, 1966-2006. 1803 35

We resume an exchange of ideas with Uta Frith that started before the turn of the century. The curious incident responsible for this exchange was the finding that children with autism fail tests of false belief, while they pass Zaitchik's (1990) photograph task (Leekam & Perner, 1991). This finding led to the conclusion that children with autism have a domain-specific impairment in Theory of Mind (mental representations), because the photograph task and the false-belief task are structurally equivalent except for the nonmental character of photographs. In this paper we argue that the false-belief task and the false-photograph task are not structurally equivalent and are not empirically associated. Instead a truly structurally equivalent task is the false-sign task. Performance on this task is strongly associated with the false-belief task. A version of this task, the misleading-signal task, also poses severe problems for children with autism (Bowler, Briskman, Gurvidi, & Fornells-Ambrojo, 2005). These new findings therefore challenge the earlier interpretation of a domain-specific difficulty in inferring mental states and suggest that children with autism also have difficulty understanding misleading nonmental objects. Brain imaging data using false-belief, "false"-photo, and false-sign scenarios provide further supporting evidence for our conclusions.
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PMID:The curious incident of the photo that was accused of being false: issues of domain specificity in development, autism, and brain imaging. 1803 40

In the current paper, the "fine cuts" approach advocated by Uta Frith is applied to our understanding of empathy and amygdala dysfunction in two disorders, psychopathy and autism. A fine cut is made between cognitive (i.e., Theory of Mind) and emotional empathy. The literature with respect to psychopathy and autism and these two functions is then considered. A fine cut is also made between the amygdala's role in stimulus-reinforcement association and specific aspects of social cognition. Again the literature with respect to psychopathy and autism and these two functions of the amygdala is considered. It is concluded that while both conditions can be considered disorders of social cognition, fine cuts can be made dissociating the impairments associated with each.
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PMID:Fine cuts of empathy and the amygdala: dissociable deficits in psychopathy and autism. 1803 46