Autism (yuh)

Question 1

When can we diagnose someone with ASD?

Answer 1

When all of the triad and 2/4 non-triad features are present.

Question 2

How many people are being diagnosed with autism (compare old and new figures)?

Answer 2

Old: 2-4 per 10,000
New: 1 per 100

Question 3

When is autism typically identified in patients?

Answer 3

Between 2 - 5 years old, but some older.

Question 4

Which country is autism most prevalent in?

Answer 4

Australia - 4%.

Question 5

What are the triad features of ASD?

Answer 5

Qualitative deficits in:

1) Social-emotional reciprocity

2) Non-verbal communication

3) Developing & maintaining relationships

Question 6

What is it like being deficit in social-emotional reciprocity?

Answer 6

Failure of back & forth convo, reduced sharing of interests, emotions or affect; fail to initiate or respond to social interactions

Question 7

What is poor non-verbal communication?

Answer 7

Atypical eye contact and body language, or have trouble understanding & using gestures; lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication

Question 8

What is it like having poor relationships?

Answer 8

Difficulty adjusting behaviour to suit varying social contexts, sharing imaginative play or making friends (uninterested in peers)

Question 9

What are the 4 non-triad features of ASD?

Answer 9

1) Stereotyped behaviour: repetitive motor movements, lining up toys, echolalia

2) Insistence on sameness: inflexible routines, change = distress, same food / routes everyday

3) Restricted Interests: object attachment, narrow interests

4) Hyper / hypo-reactivity to senses: smells objects, fascination with lights, adverse response to sounds vs apparent indifference to pain

Question 10

What are savant abilities?

Answer 10

Exceptional aptitude in one domain: usually music, calculation, drawing

1 in 10 autistic people have it.

Question 11

What kind of IQ profile does an autistic person have?

Answer 11

Spiky: excel on some IQ tasks (block design - make target pattern with cubes) and fail on others (picture arrangement - put pics in sequence)

Question 12

Is “refrigerator mother” a cause of autism? Why or why not?

Answer 12

No. Coldness from mother may lead to insecure attachment behaviour, but more due to learning difficulties. Poor parenting can lead to worse ToM, but doesn’t = autism.

Question 13

When is autism more common?

Answer 13

• In boys (3:1; however, females’ experience of autism might be diff and less explored, so harder to diagnose)
• In siblings of autistic people (50x more common than in general population)
• Higher incidence in MZ vs DZ twins; twin who doesn’t have autism still tends to have atypical language & social behaviour persisting into adulthood

Question 14

What could explain why one MZ twin might have autism, whilst the other doesn’t?

Answer 14

Difference in delivery difficulty - only one twin might have had restricted blood flow during birth

Question 15

How many genes are thought to be involved with diff mutations possibly resulting in similar autistic behaviours?

Answer 15

At least 100.

Question 16

What are the brain areas thought to be involved in autism?

Answer 16

Cerebellum, limbic system (amygdala & hippocampus)

Question 17

Does ASD arise due to a defunct in a particular brain area?

Answer 17

No; it depends on the way brain areas communicate with one another.

Question 18

What did Movsas et al. (2013) discover about the brain structure of autistic children?

Answer 18

Low birth-weight babies with enlarged ventricles at birth (reduced white matter) –> ASD more likely –> subsequent rapid growth of grey & white matter in first 2 years (so it’s higher for autistic 2 - 4 year olds, but have slower growth b/w 2 - 12 year old)

autism = 10% growth, “typical” = 59%

Impaired neural communication + schizophrenia, ADHD & dyslexia

Question 19

Where did autistic people have lower functional connectivity?

Answer 19

Frontal and parietal areas + smaller corpus callosum areas (joining both hemispheres)

Question 20

Do autistic babies have an overgrowth of neurons?

Answer 20

Yes; particularly frontal cortex (67% overabundance).

Frontal cortex = social, emotion, reasoning

Question 21

How are autistic children’s relatives like? Are there similarities?

Answer 21

Piven et al (1997)
- relatives of autistic vs Down’s children
- greater social & communication deficits and stereotyped behaviours in autistic children’s relatives

Smalley et al (1995)
- 64% of families with autistic child: 1st degree relative w major depressive disorder
- 39% of fams with autistic children: 1st degree relative w social phobia
- control fams: 19% depression, 5% social phobia

Question 22

Do family members of autistic children share similar personality characteristics?

Answer 22

Yes, especially male parents siblings of autistic children - often seen as aloof, shy, odd convos

Question 23

What did Dickerson et al (2014) and Baron-Cohen et al (1997) discover about the correlation between autistic children and their male relatives’ (father / grandfather) occupations?

Answer 23

Autistic children tend to have more male relatives in engineering.

Question 24

Is it really true that ASD inheritance is only through male line?

Answer 24

No; previous failure to establish link could be due to less women in engineering, and under-reporting of autism in females

Question 25

What are some potential environmental causes of autism?

Answer 25

1) Oxygen deprivation at birth 2) Higher levels of toxic metals in autistic children's red blood cells, impairs brain function (James et al., 2012)

Question 26

What are some theories that explain why some people have autism?

Answer 26

1) ToM impairment 2) Central Coherence deficit

Question 27

How well does an impaired ToM account for autism?

Answer 27

Accounts well for triad features, but not non-triad (hyper- or hypo-reactivity to senses + savant abilities)

Question 28

Do autistic children understand false belief?

Answer 28

Not as much as other peers. Baron-Cohen et al. (1985) - Only 20% passed the unexpected transfer task and most did well on memory qns. Baron-Cohen & Goodhart (1994) - Most also don't understand that seeing = knowing (doll looking into box vs lifting box)

Question 29

If an autistic child passes the unexpected transfer task, is their ToM still impaired?

Answer 29

Yes. They fail harder ToM tasks even when their language skills is at a level that should let them pass

Question 30

What did Temple Grandin realise about how autistic children pass ToM tasks?

Answer 30

Success on verbal ToM tasks --> unusually conscious and logical --> mental arithmetic --> hard-earned learning, not spontaneous

Question 31

Are we able to train autistic children into understanding false belief by helping them pass false belief tasks?

Answer 31

No; Hadwin et al. (1997)'s study revealed that even though autistic children taught how to reason mental states, they didn't use this knowledge in everyday interactions (stagnant communication)

Question 32

What is central coherence?

Answer 32

Ability to draw together diverse information to construct higher-level meaning. eg. remembering gist of story, not every single detail (Bartlett, 1932) eg. can distinguish appropriate word from ambiguous words (pear-pair), based on context of sentence

Question 33

What is the difference between cognitive deficit and style?

Answer 33

Cognitive deficit: poorer performance in all situations vs style: advantaged in some situations, disadvantaged in others

Question 34

What are the two main patterns in autism?

Answer 34

1) Deficit in ToM 2) Diff styles of general processing

Question 35

What kind of tasks do autistic children excel in?

Answer 35

Titchener Illusions (don't succumb as easily): automatically dis-embed central circles Embedded Figures Test (Shah & Frith, 1983): lack tendency to see objects as a whole (the Gestalt), focus on parts more

Question 36

What was an interesting difference between autistic participants and controls in the Wechster Block Design task (Shah & Frith, 1993)?

Answer 36

Autistic participants performed worse with pre-segmented design, whilst controls benefitted. Weak central coherence --> autistic children already see object in its parts

Question 37

When is weak central coherence beneficial and disadvantageous?

Answer 37

Beneficial: processing of parts required, rather than wholes Boo: needs to consider as a whole (eg. disambiguation of homographs / same word with diff meanings --> took a deep bow vs had a pink bow, diff can only be realised by considering sentence as a whole

Question 38

Do patterned sounds help autistic children recall better (Frith, 1989)?

Answer 38

No, as they are less likely to see the patterns than control groups.

Question 39

Is there a genetic link of central coherence between autistic children and their relatives?

Answer 39

Yes. Fathers of autism group were less susceptible to illusion and performed faster in EFT and block design. (inherited processing style)

Question 40

What can we conclude about the genetic link in autism?

Answer 40

Broader phenotype of autism amongst male relatives of autistic individuals - includes behaviours (occupation, psych illness) and cognitive styles (central coherence)

Question 41

What trends in autism does weak central coherence account for?

Answer 41

Non-triad features, savant abilities (attention to detail) and spiky IQ profiles.

Question 42

What did Klin et al. (2002) discover about where autistic people focus on in social situations?

Answer 42

Autistic people focus on mouths, whilst non-autistic people look at eyes.

Question 43

What is Williams Syndrome?

Answer 43

- mild to moderate intellectual disability, poor spatial skills, but relatively good language production and facial processing - caused by absence of one copy of 20 genes on chromosome 7 - behavioural problems, unusually friendly, sociable and empathic - little fear of strangers; tend to talk to them

Question 44

Compared to Downs syndrome individuals, how did children with Williams Syndrome fare when explaining depicted scenes (Jones et al., 2000)?

Answer 44

- Longer and more complex narratives - Greater expressive detail - More vocal affective prosody (emotional pitch changes) - evaluative devices (renew audience attention with character speech, sound effects, audience hookers and empathic markers)

Question 45

What happens when children with WS are separated from their parents?

Answer 45

Less -ve affect than typical children, and also less intense expression if they do express -ve affect.

Question 46

During the Barrier Task, where do children with WS focus on vs autistic children?

Answer 46

WS syndrome: experimenter's face autistic: look at the toy

Question 47

How do WS children rate unknown faces?

Answer 47

More approachable.

Question 48

How are WS children rated in terms of sociability, compared to autistic or Downs syndrome children?

Answer 48

More sociable