L4 - Theories of Autism

Question 1

What is the prevalence of autism ?

Answer 1

Autism spectrum disorder
Asperger’s syndrome - people on the spectrum without language delay or learning disability
1% of the population - many remained undiagnosed

Question 2

What is autism?

Answer 2

Clinically defined as:
- Impairments in social-communication
- Restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour
Extremely heterogenous in terms of core clinical features and associated neurocognitive profile

Question 3

What is the definition and deficit criteria that the DSM-V say are autistic traits?

Answer 3

Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts
Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity
Deficits in nonverbal communication
Deficits in developing, maintaining and understanding relationships

Stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects or speech
Insistence on sameness, inflexibility
Highly restricted, fixated interested that are abnormal intensity
Hyper-reactive to sensory input or unusual interest

Question 4

What makes a good theory of autism?

Answer 4

Specificity
Uniqueness
Universality

Question 5

What is the theory of mind towards autism?

Answer 5

Agent without a mind
Not understanding others’ minds
Baron-Cohen 1985 - autistic children found the FB task difficult compared to control
Autistic children are less likely to attribute mental states to things in the environment

Question 6

What is the hypothesis of autism?

Answer 6

Good specificity for autism characteristics
- powerful and convincing
- difficulties in relating, communicating
- all related to understanding of the mind
But NOT universal
- not shown in every single autistic person
- what about the 20% that did pass the ToM

Question 7

What are some evidence for autism and ToM?

Answer 7

Sparrevohn and Howie 1995 - autistic children with higher verbal mental age more likely to pass ToM tasks
Happe 1995 - relationship between child’s verbal mental age and passing FB tasks, verbal mental age of 12 able to pass compared to 4yrs in typical developing children

Question 8

What is the 2nd order belief task?

Answer 8

Mary and John saw the ice cream van in the park
Mary went home for money
John saw the ice cream van move to the church
Mary sees the ice cream van at the church
John sets out to find Mary, he is told she is getting ice cream
Where with John look for Mary?

Baron-Cohen 1989 - autistic people pass 1st order, fail 2nd order, propose ToM was delay rather than deficit
BUT Asperger’s pass 2nd order
Not diagnostic

Question 9

Is deficit of ToM unique to ASD?

Answer 9

Children with visual impairment showed difficulty with false belief (Minter, Hobson, Bishop, 1998)
Children with hearing impairments have delayed acknowledging false belief (Woolfe, Want and Siegal 2002)
Communication disadvantage leads to delay in understanding minds
ToM deficit not unique to ASD

Question 10

Does ToM have good specificity?

Answer 10

Accounts for social and communication impairments
BUT:
Insistence on sameness
Routines
Narrow interest
Repetitive behaviour

Question 11

What is executive control?

Answer 11

Proposed to account for social and non-social symptoms (repetitive behaviour)
The ability to maintain an appropriate problem-solving set for the attainment of a future goal
Includes behaviours such as; planning, impulse control, inhibition of responses, set maintenance, organised search, flexibility

Question 12

What did Ozonoff 1991 find about executive control?

Answer 12

Tower of Hanoi - acted impulsively, could not plan several moves ahead, shifted all loops directly
Wisconsin card sort - unable to shift attentional focus, preserved to sort by established systems
Theory of Mind tests - many passed 1st, some passed 2nd (not a common denominator like the other two)

Question 13

Can executive control explain social/communication problems?

Answer 13

Perhaps FB failure due to insufficient imagination?
Windows task - children <4yrs and autistic unable to inhibit pre-potent response
Cannot resist to point in the direction
Maybe FB task is about failure to inhibit?

Question 14

Is executive dysfunction the primary cause of ASD?

Answer 14

ASD has no problem with sabotage but cannot lie
Impairment is not an EF deficit
- not specific
Adult onset ED not cause ASD
- not unique
No evidence for executive dysfunction in ASD preschool children
- not universale

Question 15

What is weak central coherence?

Answer 15

Attempts to explain social and non-social
- Firth 2003n
Do not automatically process contextual meaning or use prior knowledge
A bias towards piecemeal or local processing

Question 16

How does weak central coherence and difficulties in ASD relate to each other?

Answer 16

Language processing - those with ASD fail to use context when processing ambiguous homographs
Literal
Difficulty with sarcasm and irony

Question 17

How does weak central coherence and perception relate to each other?

Answer 17

Embedded figures test (Shah and Firth 1983)
ASD significantly faster than matched controls
Pring 1995 - individuals with autism were as fast solving a jigsaw upside down as right way up, they should be doing it faster the right way up

Question 18

What is the inconsistent evidence for WCC?

Answer 18

Happe 1996 reduced susceptibility to visual illusions

Question 19

Is WCC a primary cause of ASD?

Answer 19

Good specificity
Not universal (not all show WCC)
Children with pragmatic language impairment also have problems with processing context

Question 20

Should we give up on a single explanation of ASD?

Answer 20

The 3 main cognitive theories explain some symptoms of ASD but not all
May be domain-general or specific
No uniqueness or universality to ASD
Autism cannot be explained by a single cognitive deficit

Question 21

What is the social model compared to the medical model?

Answer 21

Medical model - difficulties are neurotypical within oneself
Social model - it is a result of society such as prejudice, barriers, knowledge and differences - should adapt society to fix it

Question 22

What is the double empathy problem?

Answer 22

Milton 2012
Medical model says autistic - autistic interactions are harder
DEP says that autistic - autistic interactions are more efficient as they have similar views and experiences

Question 23

What are Cromptons diffusion chains 2019?

Answer 23

Matched on age, gender, IQ, education and diagnosis
Autistic peer to peer information transfer more efficient than mixed chain

However:
Not representative - small sample
Participants aware of diagnostic status
Chains not gender balanced

Question 24

How are autistic people perceived?

Answer 24

12 autistic and 16 non-autistic adults recorded while interaction
Groups matched
UG students rated the people from 10 images randomly sampled
Non-autistic people tended to rate autistic people less socially favourable due to audio/visual cues

However: images may not reflect real life, only explored explicit judgement, not representative - largely male

Question 25

What did Sheppard 2019 find out about how non-autistic people view autistic people?

Answer 25

They find autistic people harder to read
Non-autistic people might rate autistic people negatively because they are hard to read
Disclosing autism diagnosis and increased autism knowledge increased ratings of autistic people

Question 26

How does autistic traits and friendship link together?

Answer 26

DSM-V diagnosis criteria for autism includes deficits in forming stable long-lasting relationships
This only occurs when each person has very different views and experience

Question 27

What is the enactive mind?

Answer 27

Kiln 2000 - social information might be less salient to autistic children which a effect development
Perhaps providing learning opportunities to autistic children early on in development could improve social and communication skills

Question 28

What is the transporters?

Answer 28

Video of trains with real faces acting out social situations
Autistic children watched everyday for 4 weeks
Children were asked to match the correct emotion face to the situation
Used both emotions from the DVD and new faces (generalisation)
Autistic children in the intervention group significantly improved across all measures when control didn’t change

Question 29

What is the critical appraisal for the transporters experiment?

Answer 29

Important to check replication and consistency
Have they been tested across contexts and designs?
Young and Poselt 2012 - children who watched transporters improved in emotion recognition compared to other children that watched watched thomas the tank

Question 30

What is a systematic review of interventions?

Answer 30

What is the available evidence regarding interventions aiming to improve social and communication skills
Can give really useful information about whether we can trust an intervention:
Systematic search of the literature to identify studies
Quality assessment of the evidence
Synthesis results to identify gaps and weaknesses across studies

Question 31

What is a meta analysis?

Answer 31

Pool data across systematically identified studies from a review
Can give useful information across studies about effectiveness
Are they replicable? How do size effects differ?
Ideally we want consistent evidence
Limited evidence

Question 32

What are some other interventions?

Answer 32

Applied behaviour analysis - intense early intervention, developed by Lovaas in 1987, behaviourist approach to repress challenging behaviour
Systematic and meta analysis show limited evidence in support
Potential harms not captured in research
Be cautious when recommending interventions

Question 33

What is autism acceptance training?

Answer 33

238 non-autistic adults
- general mental health training not specific to autism
Survey assessed:
- explicit autism knowledge, stigma and impressions of autistic adults
- implicit association task about autism

Results:
- more positive impressions of autistic adults
- fewer misconceptions
- endorsed higher expectations of autistic
- greater social interest
No effect on implicit biases
Explicit does not mean implicit attitude change