Lecture 9 Flashcards
(19 cards)
1
Q
What is atypical social perception?
A
Differences from typical perception: what is different and why
2
Q
What is Autism?
A
- Atypicalities in social communication, restricted and repetitive behaviours
- Spectrum is because symptoms are expressed at different levels e.g non-verbal and intellectual disabilities vs fully-verbal and above average intelligence
- Higher prevalence in boys than girls
- 70% have one or more co-occurring condition
- Learning disabilities in 50%
3
Q
What are the two symptom domains?
A
1) Social communication and interaction:
- Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity
- Deficits in non-verbal communication
- Deficits in maintaining/understanding relationships
2) Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, activities
- Repetitive movements, objects, speech
- Insistence on sameness, inflexible routines
- Restricted interests of abnormal intensity
- Hyperreactivity or hyporeactivity to sensory env or input
4
Q
What is face recognition in autism?
A
- Looking at recognition of familiar faces in autistic group
- Presented faces of peers with masks that covered different parts of face
- All control groups had similar performances when top half was visible BUT no difference in autism group between top half and bottom half of picture = autistic people treat faces like any other object
5
Q
What was a study looking at difficulty in facial identity recognition in autism?
A
- Qualitative = how facial identity is processes: Face inversion effect, part-whole effect and composite effect show no differences between controls and autism
- Quantitative = how well facial identity is processes: in face memory autistic people performed worse
- Simple face matching was equal in performance
- For facial identity recognition, difficulties in autism seem to be strongly related to face memory
6
Q
Is face recognition in autism domain specific or process specific?
A
- Process specific = difficulty in remembering the faces or discriminating (think its remembering)
- Domain: is it specific to faces, or social stimuli or category specific
- Tested recognition of faces, bodies, cars and houses = face discrimination AND face memory task
- If process specific then expect to see face memory difficulties but no perceptual difficulties
- If domain specific then expect to see specific domain stimulus affected but not other objects
- Memory task: study phase with faces/cars, and tested on then
- Discrimination task: target stimulus or target&morph and had to guess which one you had seen before
- Found that on memory task there was only significantly lower accuracy for social stimuli in autistic individuals (faces and bodies)
- For the discrimination task, autistic individuals performed worse in body stimuli
- When you compare both tasks, it is just the faces that have difficulty being recognised
- Support for domain specificity, but not just faces but all social stimuli
- Support for process specificity through face memory vs face discrimination
7
Q
What are the meta-analyses for facial recognition in autism?
A
- General reduction in facial expression recognition with moderate effect size = no strong evidence for differences by emotion
- Meyer-Lindenberg looked at EU AIMS study: looked at 3 emotion recognition tasks: KDEF, RMET, FET
- Reduction in individuals with autism
8
Q
What are face viewing patterns in autism?
A
- Combined eyetracking and emotion recognition task
- Notably different scan paths when viewing face in autism
- Reduced accuracy in recognition of emotion in autism
- Used bubbles approach to look at at which areas of face are being used to identify expressions = autistic people focu more on mouth region
- BUT no differences in performance
- Atypical viewing patterns are unlikely to be reason for emotion recognition difficulties
9
Q
What are neuroimaging studies of face processing in autism? (Adolescence)
A
- 10 adolescence with Autism
- Dynamic video clips of neutral faces, places and objects
- Reduced activity in FFA, OFA, STST in response to faces
- But autistic individuals show atypical viewing patterns
10
Q
What was a study looking at eye movements and time for autistic people?
A
- Looking at emotion and identity recognition in scanner
- Had two tasks: different emotions and viewpoints/familiar and unfamiliar faces
- Reduced activity in FFA in both tasks for autistic group
- When looked at average duration of fixation for faces as a whole for mouths and eyes, there is a significant difference in eye fixation compared to others
- Correlation between how long people spent looking at eye region and how much activity seen in FFA and amygdala
11
Q
What was the study looking at children and autism?
A
- Typical children, below average IQ and autistic children were presented with faces and asked which one was looking at them = no differences between groups
- Asked children what sweet did this face want = below average and typical children could answer, but autistic ability struggled = difficulty understanding social significance associated with eye gaze
12
Q
What is joint attention?
A
Follow and orient gaze where someone else is looking = gives insight and is a precursor to ToM
13
Q
What was a study about joint attention in autism?
A
- Looked at 3-4yo with autism, a developmental delay but no autism and typical
- Had a social orienting task and joint attention task measured by head turns and pointing
- Less social orienting to social cues in autistic children
- Autistic children made fewer attempts to create joint attention and less likely to respond to joint attention signals from experimenter
- Joint attention predicts language ability
14
Q
What is the neuroimaging evidence in adults?
A
- Regions of brain that respond to changes in eye gaze - pSTS
- Task: looking at eye gaze and how it moves to a target either congruently or not
- Non-autistic individuals had an increased response in pSTS to incongruent trials = when gaze was doing something unexpected
- Autistic individuals did not discriminate to incongruent stimuli = suggests autistic adults are insensitive to social component to gaze
15
Q
Brain development in autism?
A
- Based on meta-analysis: at birth autistic people have a smaller head circumference
- Larger head circumference in 1-2yo
- Period of greatest enlargement in autism in toddler/early childhood
- Early brain overgrowth at beginning of life, then slowing or arrest of growth
- Overgrowth of cerebral grey matter but different regions show different patterns = peak growth in frontal/temporal regions which mediate higher-order functions
- Could be due to lack of pruning because there is atypical system inputs (experience) but not sure
- Long-range connections reduced, increased short-range connections.
16
Q
What are the origin of social perception differences?
A
- Genetic origins: twin and family studies suggest high heritability of autism
- Are social orienting systems absent from birth? Or are they present?
17
Q
What is a study looking at if infants with autism show preference to faces? (Adult congruency)
A
- Using a cueing design with a normal face on one side and inverted on the other side
- Participants were asked to identify where a letter was on the screen, the normal face would have faster reaction times due to preferential looking
- In adults with autism: speeding up for RT for face prototype = suggests in adults there is automatic orienting to face stimuli = not a life-long difficulty = seems system is not present at birth
18
Q
What was a study looking high risk infants?
A
- Sibling with autism
- Longitudinal study, followed fixation patterns to faces while watching a video of a woman attempting to engage them in social interaction
- Expecting to find more fixation for non-autistic in eyes
- Actually found that no differences in early months about how much time looked at eye regions
- Steep decline in autistic individual but in others it is relatively constant = more severe decline = more severe social dysfunction
- Suggests systems are similar at birth and changes after
19
Q
What is social motivation theory?
A
- Reward value assigned to social stimuli is reduced = reduced attending to and engaging with social stimuli and difficulties because of reduced engagement
- Lack of specialisation - views it as a consequence
- But some evidence inconsistent with this theory e.g reduced orienting to biological motion in infants with autism (theory more primitive than social motivation and develops before)
- Can be linked with social cognition as difficulties in social cognition which leads to diminished social interest = a cause
