Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
Pivot Concepts:   Target Concepts:
Query: UMLS:C0004352 (autism)
 32,579 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Interoception, the perception of the body's internal state, contributes to numerous aspects of higher-order cognition. Several theories suggest a causal role for atypical interoception in specific psychiatric disorders, including a recent claim that atypical interoception represents a transdiagnostic impairment across disorders characterized by reduced perception of one's own emotion (alexithymia). Such theories are supported predominantly by evidence from only one interoceptive domain (cardiac); however, evidence of domain-specific interoceptive ability highlights the need to assess interoception in noncardiac domains. Using novel interoceptive tasks, we demonstrate that individuals high in alexithymic traits show a reduced propensity to utilize interoceptive cues to gauge respiratory output (Experiment 1), reduced accuracy on tasks of muscular effort (Experiment 2), and taste sensitivity (Experiment 3), unrelated to any co-occurring autism, depression, or anxiety. Results suggest that alexithymia reflects a multidomain, multidimensional failure of interoception, which is consistent with theories suggesting that atypical interoception may underpin both symptom commonalities between psychiatric disorders and heterogeneity within disorders. (PsycINFO Database Record
J Exp Psychol Gen 2018 03
PMID:Alexithymia is associated with a multidomain, multidimensional failure of interoception: Evidence from novel tests. 2915 12

We have previously observed that participants with autism spectrum condition (ASC) are more influenced by visual distractors during a tactile task compared with controls (Poole, Gowen, Warren, & Poliakoff, 2015). This finding suggests that changes in multisensory processing could underpin differences in sensory reactivity in ASC. Here we explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying this effect. Adults with ASC (n = 22) and matched neurotypical (NT) controls (n = 22) completed 3 tasks involving similar stimuli. In Experiment 1, we again showed that when participants with ASC were performing a tactile task they were distracted more by visual stimuli compared with NTs. In Experiment 2, however, no differences between the groups were observed on an alternative visual-tactile task (temporal order judgment) requiring attention to both the stimuli. That is, ASC performance was typical when the task did not require the visual stimuli to be suppressed. Furthermore, in Experiment 3 the effects of visual distractors were comparable between the groups when the tactile target was replaced with a visual target. When comparing performance across Experiments 1 and 3, NT participants were better able to suppress visual distractors when the target was tactile than when the target was visual (Experiment 1 vs. 3), but this crossmodal benefit was not observed in participants with ASC. The effects of visual distractors were comparable regardless of the target modality suggesting that the efficacy of visual-tactile selective attention may be reduced in ASC. (PsycINFO Database Record
J Exp Psychol Gen 2018 Sep
PMID:Visual-tactile selective attention in autism spectrum condition: An increased influence of visual distractors. 2996 87

Emerging accounts of autism suggest that flexible and broadly tuned perceptual representations, presumably resulting from reduced specialization, may underlie atypical perception. Here, we examined the other-race effect (ORE) to study face processing specialization arising from specific experience with own-race faces. Face discrimination was tested for own- and other-race faces in typically developed individuals and in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). For each race, faces were morphed to vary discrimination difficulty, and orientation was manipulated to examine inversion effects. The ASD group displayed overall lower sensitivity and reduced inversion effects in processing faces. Importantly, the processing advantage for own-race faces was substantially smaller in this group, resulting specifically from the reduced specialization for the own-race faces. Moreover, the typical larger inversion effect for Caucasian faces was not observed in the ASD group; sensitivity to orientation was smaller and equivalent for the two face races. These more broadly tuned representations in autism may account for the overall weaker representations of faces and suggest, more broadly, that a failure in perceptual specialization may underlie atypical perception in autism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
J Exp Psychol Gen 2019 Mar
PMID:Reduced perceptual specialization in autism: Evidence from the other-race face effect. 3065 91

Typically developing (TD) individuals rapidly integrate information about a speaker and their intended meaning while processing sentences online. We examined whether the same processes are activated in autistic adults and tested their timecourse in 2 preregistered experiments. Experiment 1 employed the visual world paradigm. Participants listened to sentences where the speaker's voice and message were either consistent or inconsistent (e.g., "When we go shopping, I usually look for my favorite wine," spoken by an adult or a child), and concurrently viewed visual scenes including consistent and inconsistent objects (e.g., wine and sweets). All participants were slower to select the mentioned object in the inconsistent condition. Importantly, eye movements showed a visual bias toward the voice-consistent object, well before hearing the disambiguating word, showing that autistic adults rapidly use the speaker's voice to anticipate the intended meaning. However, this target bias emerged earlier in the TD group compared to the autism group (2240 ms vs. 1800 ms before disambiguation). Experiment 2 recorded ERPs to explore speaker-meaning integration processes. Participants listened to sentences as described above, and ERPs were time-locked to the onset of the target word. A control condition included a semantic anomaly. Results revealed an enhanced N400 for inconsistent speaker-meaning sentences that was comparable to that elicited by anomalous sentences, in both groups. Overall, contrary to research that has characterized autism in terms of a local processing bias and pragmatic dysfunction, autistic people were unimpaired at integrating multiple modalities of linguistic information and were comparably sensitive to speaker-meaning inconsistency effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
J Exp Psychol Gen 2020 Jun
PMID:Autistic adults anticipate and integrate meaning based on the speaker's voice: Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials. 3171 95

Questions of how we know our own and other minds, and whether metacognition and mindreading rely on the same processes, are longstanding in psychology and philosophy. In Experiment 1, children/adolescents with autism (who tend to show attenuated mindreading) showed significantly lower accuracy on an explicit metacognition task than neurotypical children/adolescents, but not on an allegedly metacognitive implicit one. In Experiment 2, neurotypical adults completed these tasks in a single-task condition or a dual-task condition that required concurrent completion of a secondary task that tapped mindreading. Metacognitive accuracy was significantly diminished by the dual-mindreading-task on the explicit task but not the implicit task. In Experiment 3, we included additional dual-tasks to rule out the possibility that any secondary task (regardless of whether it required mindreading) would diminish metacognitive accuracy. Finally, in both Experiments 1 and 2, metacognitive accuracy on the explicit task, but not the implicit task, was associated significantly with performance on a measure of mindreading ability. These results suggest that explicit metacognitive tasks (used frequently to measure metacognition in humans) share metarepresentational processing resources with mindreading, whereas implicit tasks (which are claimed by some comparative psychologists to measure metacognition in nonhuman animals) do not. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
J Exp Psychol Gen 2020 Sep 10
PMID:Linking metacognition and mindreading: Evidence from autism and dual-task investigations. 3291 16

People vary in their self-awareness of their own emotions, and this may predict psychological well-being. Evidence suggests that emotional self-awareness is diminished in autism, but these findings may be biased by self-report or confounded by verbal intelligence. To address this issue, we developed the emotional consistency (EC) task, measuring emotional self-awareness through consistency in emotional decision-making. In the EC-Task, we showed participants pairs of emotional images, asking them to judge which evoked the more intense emotional experience. The logical consistency of decision making, based on transitive relationships between stimuli, reflects precision of judgment of experience of emotional intensity, which in turn reflects emotional self-awareness. Emotional consistency significantly correlated with lower self-reported alexithymia but not autistic traits. Instead, autistic traits predicted greater discrepancy between EC-Task performance and self-reported difficulties identifying feelings. Participants with higher autistic traits were more likely to underestimate their emotional self-awareness, possibly because of greater metacognitive difficulties and negative self-beliefs. Our study suggests emotional self-awareness is not diminished in autism and provides a novel method to investigate this issue. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
J Exp Psychol Gen 2020 Oct 01
PMID:Autistic traits predict underestimation of emotional abilities. 3300 89


<< Previous 1 2 3 4