Top

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

Gepubliceerd in:

01-12-2009 | Original Paper

Identifying Symbolic Relationships in Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Deficit in the Identification of Temporal Co-occurrence?

Auteurs: Catherine S. Ames, Chris Jarrold

Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders | Uitgave 12/2009

Abstract

Individuals with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience difficulties understanding the non-verbal cues conveyed by others that provide symbolic information about relationships between self, other, and environmental events. This study examined whether these difficulties reflect underlying problems in the identification of temporal co-occurrence, or in memorial, associative, or inference skills. The performance of a group of adolescents with ASD was compared to that of typically developing children and adolescents with learning difficulties on four tasks assessing these processes. The ASD group experienced specific difficulties when they were required to identify relationships signalled by the temporal co-occurrence of stimuli. These results are discussed in relation to theories of conceptual deduction in ASD, and a hypothesised role in social cognitive development for attention processes is outlined.

vorige artikel Sex Differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Examination of Developmental Functioning, Autistic Symptoms, and Coexisting Behavior Problems in Toddlers

volgende artikel Brief Report: Further Evidence for Inner Speech Deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorders

The second row formed the basis for a second condition of this experiment, the results of which are not presented here. It had no bearing on the Temporal Inference task condition reported here, and was presented after the data presented here had been collected.

Analysis of the regression slopes did reveal that the assumption of homogeneity was violated in the relationship between RCPM and both the memory span F(2, 45) = 6.19, p = .004, η _p ² = .22, and the total memory trials correct, F(2, 45) = 7.34, p = .002, η _p ² = .25. However, further analysis showed that the inclusion of this covariate did not change the outcome relative to the uncovaried analysis. Hence, both BPVS and Ravens scores are included as covariates throughout in each set of results reported in this paper.

Ames, C. S., & Jarrold, C. (2007). The problem with using eye-gaze to infer desire: A deficit of cue inference in children with autism spectrum disorder? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37, 1761–1775.CrossRefPubMed

Baddeley, A. D. (1986). Working memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness, an essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Baron-Cohen, S., Campbell, R., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., & Walker, J. (1995). Are children with autism blind to the mentalistic significance of the eyes? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13, 379–398.

Boucher, J., & Warrington, E. K. (1976). Memory deficits in early infantile autism: Some similarities to the amnesic syndrome. British Journal of Psychology, 67, 73–87.PubMed

Bowler, D. M., Briskman, J., Gurvidi, N., & Fornells-Ambrojo, M. (2005). Understanding the mind or predicting signal-dependent action? Performance of children with and without autism on analogues of the false-belief task. Journal of Cognition and Development, 6, 259–285.CrossRef

Charman, T. (2003). Why is joint attention a pivotal skill in autism? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 358, 315–324.CrossRef

Charman, T., Baron-Cohen, S., Swettenham, J., Baird, G., Cox, A., & Drew, A. (2000). Testing joint attention, imitation, and play as infancy precursors to language and theory of mind. Cognitive Development, 15, 481–498.CrossRef

Courchesne, E., Townsend, J. P., Akshoomoff, N. A., Yeung-Courchesne, R., Press, G. A., & Murakami, J. W. (1994). A new finding: Impairment in shifting attention in autistic and cerebellar patients. In S. H. Broman, J. Grafman, et al. (Eds.), Atypical cognitive deficits in developmental disorders. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Diamond, A. (2006). Bootstrapping conceptual deduction using physical connection: rethinking frontal cortex. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 212–218.CrossRefPubMed

Dunn, L. M., Dunn, L. M., Whetton, C., & Burley, J. (1997). British picture vocabulary scale (2nd ed.). Windsor, UK: NFER-Nelson.

Frye, D., Zelazo, P. D., & Burack, J. A. (1998). Cognitive complexity and control: 1. Theory of mind in typcial and atypical development. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 116–121.CrossRef

Frye, D., Zelazo, P. D., & Palfai, T. (1995). Theory of mind and rule-based reasoning. Cognitive Development, 10, 483–527.CrossRef

Gardiner, J. M., Bowler, D. M., & Grice, S. J. (2003). Further evidence of preserved priming and impaired recall in adults with Asperger’s syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 33, 259–269.CrossRefPubMed

Goldberg, M. C., Mostofsky, S. H., Cutting, L. E., Mahone, E. M., Astor, B. C., Denckla, M. B., et al. (2005). Subtle executive impairment in children with autism and children with ADHD. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 35, 279–293.CrossRefPubMed

Hughes, C., Plumet, M.-H., & Leboyer, M. (1999). Towards a cognitive phenotype for autism: Increased prevelance of executive dysfunction and superior spatial span amongst siblings of children with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 40, 705–718.CrossRefPubMed

Landa, R. J., & Goldberg, M. C. (2005). Language, social, and executive functions in high functioning autism: A continuum of performance. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 35, 557–573.CrossRefPubMed

Landry, R., & Bryson, S. E. (2004). Impaired disengagement of attention in young children with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45, 1115–1122.CrossRefPubMed

Lee, K., Eskritt, M., Symons, L. A., & Muir, D. (1998). Children’s use of triadic eye gaze information for “mind reading”. Developmental Psychology, 34, 525–539.CrossRefPubMed

Leekam, S., Baron-Cohen, S., Perrett, D., Milders, M., & Brown, S. (1997). Eye-direction detection: A dissociation between geometric and joint attention skills in autism. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 77–95.

Leekam, S. R., Lopez, B., & Moore, C. (2000). Attention and joint attention in preschool children with autism. Developmental Psychology, 36, 261–273.CrossRefPubMed

Lord, C., Rutter, M., & LeCouter, A. (1994). Autism diagnostic interview—revised. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 24, 659–686.CrossRefPubMed

Miller, G. A., & Chapman, J. P. (2001). Misunderstanding analysis of covariance. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110, 40–48.CrossRefPubMed

Milner, B. (1971). Interhemispheric differences in the localisation of psychological processes in man. British Medical Bulletin, 27, 272–277.PubMed

Minshew, N. J., & Goldstein, G. (2001). The pattern of intact and impaired memory functions in autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 42, 1095–1101.CrossRef

Minshew, N., Goldstein, G., Muenz, L. R., & Payton, J. B. (1992). Neuropsychological functioning in nonmentally retarded autistic individuals. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 14, 749–761.CrossRefPubMed

Morris, R. G., Rowe, A., Fox, N., Feigenbaum, J. D., Miotto, E. C., & Howlin, P. (1999). Spatial working memory in Asperger’s syndrome and in patients with focal frontal and temporal lobe lesions. Brain and Cognition, 4, 9–26.CrossRef

Perner, J. (1993). Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Raven, J. C., Court, J. H., & Raven, J. (1990). Colored progressive matrices. Oxford: Oxford Psychologists Press.

Ristic, J., Mottron, L., Kelland Friesen, C., Iarocci, G., Burack, J. A., & Kingstone, A. (2005). Eyes are special but not for everyone: The case of autism. Cognitive Brain Research, 24, 715–718.CrossRefPubMed

Rutter, M., Bailey, A., & Lord, C. (2003). The Social Communication Questionnaire. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.

Spitz, H. H. (1982). Intellectual extremes, mental age, and the nature of human intelligence. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 28, 167–192.

Townsend, J. (1996). Slowed orienting of covert visual-spatial attention in autism: Specific deficits associated with cerebellar and parietal abnormality. Development and psychopathology, 8, 563–584.CrossRef

Triesch, J., Teuscher, C., Deák, G. O., & Carlson, E. (2006). Gaze following: Why (not) learn it? Developmental Science, 9, 125–157.CrossRefPubMed

van der Geest, J. N., Kemner, C., Camfferman, G., Verbaten, M. N., & van Engeland, H. (2001). Eye movements, visual attention, and autism: A saccadic reaction time study using the gap and overlap paradigm. Biological Psychiatry, 50, 614–619.CrossRefPubMed

Wainwright-Sharp, J. A., & Bryson, S. E. (1993). Visual orienting deficits in high-functioning people with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 23, 1–23.CrossRefPubMed

Weiss, B., Weisz, J. R., & Bromfield, R. (1986). Performance of retarded and nonretarded persons on information-processing tasks: Further tests of the similar structure hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 100, 157–175.CrossRefPubMed

Williams, D. L., Goldstein, G., Carpenter, P. A., & Minshew, N. J. (2005). Verbal and spatial working memory in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 35, 747–756.CrossRefPubMed

Williams, D. L., Goldstein, G., & Minshew, N. J. (2006). The profile of memory function in children with autism. Neuropsychology, 20, 21–29.CrossRefPubMed

Zelazo, P. D., & Frye, D. (1998). Cogntive complexity and control: 2. The development of executive function in childhood. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 121.CrossRef

Zelazo, P. D., Jacques, S., Burack, J. A., & Frye, D. (2002). The relation between theory of mind and rule use: Evidence from persons with autism-spectrum disorders. Infant and Child Development, 11, 171–195.CrossRef

Titel: Identifying Symbolic Relationships in Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Deficit in the Identification of Temporal Co-occurrence?
Auteurs: Catherine S. Ames
Chris Jarrold
Publicatiedatum: 01-12-2009
Uitgeverij: Springer US
Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders / Uitgave 12/2009
Print ISSN: 0162-3257
Elektronisch ISSN: 1573-3432
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0808-2

Bohn Stafleu van Loghum

Deel dit onderdeel of sectie (kopieer de link)

Abstract

Log in om toegang te krijgen

Andere artikelen Uitgave 12/2009

Beyond Behaviour: Is Social Anxiety Low in Williams Syndrome?

L. K. Koegel and C. LaZebnik: Growing up on the Spectrum: A Guide to Life, Love, and Learning for Teens and Young Adults with Autism and Asperger’s

Brief Report: Further Evidence for Inner Speech Deficits in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Pat Mirenda and Teresa Iacono: Autism Spectrum Disorders and AAC

Dissemination of Evidence-Based Practice: Can We Train Therapists from a Distance?

Comparison of Scores on the Checklist for Autism Spectrum Disorder, Childhood Autism Rating Scale, and Gilliam Asperger’s Disorder Scale for Children with Low Functioning Autism, High Functioning Autism, Asperger’s Disorder, ADHD, and Typical Development