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This paper will discuss one aspect of the self, the ability to reflect on one's own inner states, in relation to recent work on the cognitive and neural basis of "theory of mind." Are the same representational resources required for "reading" one's own and other minds? Relevant literature from the study of normal development of theory of mind will be reviewed, along with research on a developmental disorder characterized by an apparent inability to think about thoughts: autism. Functional neuroimaging studies of theory of mind will be discussed as will studies that may tap the neural basis of self-reflection. From these different strands of evidence the speculative suggestion will be made that reflecting on one's own thoughts is not a privileged process, but rather relies on-and may have evolved from-the same cognitive and neural functions used for attributing thoughts to others.
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PMID:Theory of mind and the self. 1462 59

We investigated the expression and understanding of jealousy in 16 high-functioning children with autism and 17 typically developing children matched for IQ, chronological age, gender, and maternal education. We examined the expression of jealousy via children's behaviors, verbalizations, and affects demonstrated during two jealousy-provoking triadic scenarios (drawing and playing) enacted among the child in the experimental group (autism or typical), that child's main caregiver (mostly mothers), and a familiar peer or sibling. The two scenarios corresponded with the two types of jealousy described in past studies: social-comparison jealousy (drawing scenario) and social-relational jealousy (playing scenario). To tap children's understanding, we asked them to identify jealousy from a picture, to provide examples of times they felt jealous, and to offer suggestions for coping with jealousy. The main results revealed that children with autism expressed jealousy in situations similar to their typical age mates but manifested it in different behaviors. Moreover, children with autism revealed a less coherent understanding of the feeling. We discuss the meaning of the gap between demonstrating and understanding jealousy in light of the two central theoretical views conceptualizing the core emotional deficit in children with autism.
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PMID:The expression and understanding of jealousy in children with autism. 1511 69

The Perceptions of Children's Theory of Mind Measure (Experimental version; PCToMM-E) is an informant measure designed to tap children's theory of mind competence. Study one evaluated the measure when completed by primary caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorder. Scores demonstrated high test-retest reliability and correlated with verbal mental age and ToM task battery performance. No ceiling effects were observed. In addition, caregivers accurately predicted their children's ToM task battery performance. In study two the scores of primary caregivers of typically developing children demonstrated high test-retest reliability and distinguished children on the basis of age and developmental status. Ceiling effects were not evident until late childhood. The utility of the PCToMM-E and directions for future research are discussed.
J Autism Dev Disord 2008 Jan
PMID:Beyond false beliefs: the development and psychometric evaluation of the perceptions of children's theory of mind measure-experimental version (PCToMM-E). 1741 Apr 14

Autism is a complex disorder, characterized by social, cognitive, communicative, and motor symptoms. One suggestion, proposed in the current study, to explain the spectrum of symptoms is an underlying impairment in multisensory integration (MSI) systems such as a mirror neuron-like system. The mirror neuron system, thought to play a critical role in skills such as imitation, empathy, and language can be thought of as a multisensory system, converting sensory stimuli into motor representations. Consistent with this, we report preliminary evidence for deficits in a task thought to tap into MSI--"the bouba-kiki task" in children with ASD. The bouba-kiki effect is produced when subjects are asked to pair nonsense shapes with nonsense "words". We found that neurotypical children chose the nonsense "word" whose phonemic structure corresponded with the visual shape of the stimuli 88% of the time. This is presumably because of mirror neuron-like multisensory systems that integrate the visual shape with the corresponding motor gestures used to pronounce the nonsense word. Surprisingly, individuals with ASD only chose the corresponding name 56% of the time. The poor performance by the ASD group on this task suggests a deficit in MSI, perhaps related to impaired MSI brain systems. Though this is a behavioral study, it provides a testable hypothesis for the communication impairments in children with ASD that implicates a specific neural system and fits well with the current findings suggesting an impairment in the mirror systems in individuals with ASD.
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PMID:Preliminary evidence for deficits in multisensory integration in autism spectrum disorders: the mirror neuron hypothesis. 1897 85

We report a cross-syndrome comparison of the development of holistic processing in face recognition in school-aged children with developmental disorders: autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome. The autism group was split into two groups: one with high-functioning children and one with low-functioning children. The latter group has rarely been studied in this context. The four disorder groups were compared with typically developing children. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses were used to compare development in a modified version of Tanaka and Farah's part-whole task. Trajectories were constructed linking part-whole performance either to chronological age or to several measures of mental age (receptive vocabulary, visuospatial construction, and the Benton Facial Recognition Test). In addition to variable delays in onset and rate of development, we found an atypical profile in all disorder groups. These profiles were atypical in different ways, indicating multiple pathways to, and variable outcomes in, the development of face recognition. We discuss the implications for theories of face recognition in both atypical and typical development, including the idea that part-whole and rotation manipulations may tap different aspects of holistic and/or configural processing.
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PMID:A cross-syndrome study of the development of holistic face recognition in children with autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome. 1919 84

The executive function (EF) theory of autism has received much support recently from a growing number of studies. However, executive impairments have not always been easy to identify consistently and so novel "ecologically valid" tests have been designed which tap into real-life scenarios that are relevant to and representative of everyday behavior. One characteristic of many of these tasks is that they present the participant with an "ill-structured" or "open-ended" situation. Here, we investigated the possibility that tasks with greater degrees of open-endedness might prove more sensitive to detecting executive impairment in autism. Forty-five children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were compared to 27 age- and IQ-matched control children on a range of cognitive tests of EF. Group differences were found on half of the tasks, with the greatest degree of impairment detected on the more open-ended tasks. The ASD group also performed more poorly on a simple control condition of a task. Detailed consideration of task performance suggested that the ASD group tended to create fewer spontaneous strategies and exhibit more idiosyncratic behavior, which particularly disadvantaged them on the more open-ended tasks. These kinds of behaviors have been reported in studies of neurological patients with frontal lobe involvement, prima facie suggesting a link between the scientific fields. However, we suggest that this behavior might equally result from a poor understanding of the implicit demands made by the experimenter in open-ended test situations, due to the socio-communicative difficulties of these children.
Autism Res 2009 Jun
PMID:Impairments on "open-ended" executive function tests in autism. 1953 39

In the neuropsychological case series approach, tasks are administered that tap different cognitive domains, and differences within rather than across individuals are the basis for theorising; each individual is effectively their own control. This approach is a mainstay of cognitive neuropsychology, and is particularly suited to the study of populations with heterogeneous deficits. However it has very rarely been applied to the study of cognitive differences in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we investigate whether this approach can yield information beyond that given by the typical group study method, when applied to an ASD population. Twenty-one high-functioning adult ASD participants and 22 IQ, age, and gender-matched control participants were administered a large battery of neuropsychological tests that would represent a typical neuropsychological assessment for neurological patients in the United Kingdom. The data were analysed using both group and single-case study methods. The group analysis revealed a limited number of deficits, principally on tests with a large executive function component, with no impairment in more routine abilities such as basic attending, language and perception. Single-case study analysis proved more fruitful revealing evidence of considerable variation in abilities both between and within ASD participants. Both sub-normal and supra-normal performance were observed, with the most defining feature of the ASD group being this variability. We conclude that the use of group-level analysis alone in the study of cognitive deficits in ASD risks missing cognitive characteristics that may be vitally important both theoretically and clinically, and even may be misleading because of averaging artifact.
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PMID:Advantages of the multiple case series approach to the study of cognitive deficits in autism spectrum disorder. 1958 Aug 21

Both the putative mirror neuron system (pMNS) and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) are deemed important for social interaction: the pMNS because it supposedly "resonates" with the actions of others, the vmPFC because it is involved in mentalizing. Strictly speaking, the resonance property of the pMNS has never been investigated. Classical functional MRI experiments have only investigated whether pMNS regions augment their activity when an action is seen or executed. Resonance, however, entails more than only "going on and off together". Activity in the pMNS of an observer should continuously follow the more subtle changes over time in activity of the pMNS of the actor. Here we directly explore whether such resonance indeed occurs during continuous streams of actions. We let participants play the game of charades while we measured brain activity of both gesturer and guesser. We then applied a method to localize directed influences between the brains of the participants: between-brain Granger-causality mapping. Results show that a guesser's brain activity in regions involved in mentalizing and mirroring echoes the temporal structure of a gesturer's brain activity. This provides evidence for resonance theories and indicates a fine-grained temporal interplay between regions involved in motor planning and regions involved in thinking about the mental states of others. Furthermore, this method enables experiments to be more ecologically valid by providing the opportunity to leave social interaction unconstrained. This, in turn, would allow us to tap into the neural substrates of social deficits such as autism spectrum disorder.
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PMID:Mapping the information flow from one brain to another during gestural communication. 2043 36

Research on social cognition focuses on several human abilities with a huge diversity in the approaches to tap the different functions. Empathy, for instance, is a rather elaborated human ability, and several recent studies point to significant impairments in patients suffering from psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia or autism. Neuroimaging data from these patients commonly indicate neural dysfunctions accompanying the behavioral deficits. Studying the neural correlates of social cognition is of particular importance, because deficits in these domains may explain the major dysfunctions in psychiatric disorders that prevent effective (re) integration into work and social life. It has also become clearer that social cognition deficits, similar to emotion dysfunctions, may represent trait markers and endophenotypes of the diseases. However, there are several challenges for future studies on social cognitive dysfunctions: on the one hand, the complexity of the constructs and thus the variety of definitions which make it hard to develop adequate tasks. On the other hand, results are needed that particularly address the disorder specificity of these impairments, as well as their potential as endophenotypes via analyzing people at high-risk and their relatives.
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PMID:Deficits in social cognition: a marker for psychiatric disorders? 2186 44

Using a key word search on electronic databases, two relevant journals and relevant review references, four measures of autistic symptoms (Childhood Asperger Syndrome Test, Autism Behavior Checklist, Social Communication Questionnaire, Social Responsiveness Scale) were reviewed with reference to their ability to discriminate the three major components of autism and measure across the whole spectrum of autism. None of the reviewed measures were able to effectively tap into and differentiate between all points on the spectrum. Further work is required to assess the sensitivity of the measures to independence between domains. The development of a measure sensitive to symptom change/continuity across development may be useful.
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PMID:Measurement of autism: a review of four screening measures. 2202 47


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