Cognitive granularity: A new perspective over autistic and non-autistic styles of development - Kozima - 2013 - Japanese Psychological Research. Abstract Individuals with autism generally show better performance on operating physical objects than in communicating with people. However, we lack a plausible model of autism that explains why their physical and social capabilities develop in separate and unbalanced ways.
This paper investigates this question from the viewpoint of “cognitive granularity,” which refers to the size of the basic elements operable in one's cognitive system. While it is constrained by one's perceptual and motor resolution, cognitive granularity determines the level of abstraction at which one can efficiently predict and control the physical and social world. Recent findings in autism research, including preference for causal predictability and abnormalities in neuroanatomical density, suggest that individuals with autism have finer cognitive granularity; they live in a different “Umwelt” from that which non-autistic people experience.
Granularity in brain and cognition Cognitive granularity in autism. Global/Local Processing in Autism: Not a Disability, but a Disinclination - Online First. The skin-brain axis and autism? Correlation between autism diagnosis and organic food sales. When the world becomes 'too real': a Bayesia... [Trends Cogn Sci. 2012.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Alternative Bayesian accounts of autistic perception: comment on Pellicano and Burr. The Neurocritic: Savoir Faire or Savant? Is amygdala volume correlated with social network size or with special talents in autism spectrum disorders? Or both?? The amygdala is a subcortical structure located within the medial temporal lobes. It consists of a number of different nuclei, or collections of neurons delineated by commonalities in morphology and connectivity. The amygdala is best known for major roles in fear conditioning (Paré et al., 2004) and responding to emotional stimuli more generally (Phelps & LeDoux, 2005), but its functions extend beyond that.
Dr. Virginia Hughes wrote a splendid summary of the study, which is not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal. An earlier experiment was conducted with another very talented autistic savant (Corrigan et al., 2012): The subject of this study is a 63-year-old, right-handed male with savant syndrome and a long-standing diagnosis of ASD.1 Institutionalized as a child, he has lived semi-independently as an adult, working for more than 30 years in dishwashing jobs. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Online First™ Temporal discounting of monetary rewards in children and adolescents with ADHD and autism spectrum disorders - Demurie - 2012 - Developmental Science.
Consciousness as the key to our mental traits. Clare Wilson, features editor In The Ravenous Brain Daniel Bor explores consciousness and suggests that its level of activity is linked to several psychiatric conditions It is a long-standing philosophical conundrum: is consciousness somehow separate from the physical world or merely an illusion conjured up by our complex brains? It took his father's stroke to convince Daniel Bor which side he was on. Bor, who had previously been considering a PhD in the philosophy of mind, opted instead for one in the neuroscience of consciousness.
To see his father "robbed of his identity because a small clot on his brain had potently wounded his consciousness" hammered home all too well that the mind really is the output of nothing more than a small sac of jelly. But what an amazing sac of jelly it is. He also introduces us to conjoined twins with linked brains, an autistic synaesthete who can memorise the digits of pi up to 22,514 decimal places and chimpanzees that practise sophisticated mind games.
BMC Neuroscience | Abstract | Impaired social brain network for processing dynamic facial expressions in autism spectrum disorders. Altered integration of speech and gesture in children with autism spectrum disorders - Hubbard - 2012 - Brain and Behavior. Zinc and Autistic Spectrum Disorders. Autistic spectrum disorders are complicated and most likely caused by a number of different problems.
However, we still don’t know definitively if something in the diet could influence autism. The following study can’t answer that question due to the design, but it does point out some interesting links: Infantile zinc deficiency: Association with autism spectrum disorders . In this study, nearly 2000 children with autistic disorders had hair tested for zinc deficiency. 584 (29.6%) subjects had levels lower than two standard deviations below the mean of the reference range. 43.5% of the male children ages 0-3 and 52.5% of the female children 0-3 in the sample were zinc deficient.
Older children with autism in the study had a lower incidence of zinc deficiency, which continued to decrease with the age of the subject sample, to the point where autistic children over the age of 10 had normal zinc levels. But measuring a mineral deficiency is more tricky than it might appear. Image Credit. Affective Responses by Adults with Autism Are Reduced to Social Images but Elevated to Images Related to Circumscribed Interests.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) demonstrate increased visual attention and elevated brain reward circuitry responses to images related to circumscribed interests (CI), suggesting that a heightened affective response to CI may underlie their disproportionate salience and reward value in ASD. To determine if individuals with ASD differ from typically developing (TD) adults in their subjective emotional experience of CI object images, non-CI object images and social images, 213 TD adults and 56 adults with ASD provided arousal ratings (sensation of being energized varying along a dimension from calm to excited) and valence ratings (emotionality varying along dimension of approach to withdrawal) for a series of 114 images derived from previous research on CI.
The groups did not differ on arousal ratings for any image type, but ASD adults provided higher valence ratings than TD adults for CI-related images, and lower valence ratings for social images. Figures Introduction. In my shoes - Aspienaut - WIRED differently. Rare Genetic Illness May Shed Light on Role of Hormones in Autism, Anxiety. By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on June 25, 2012 A new study involving children with Williams syndrome (WS) suggests that improved regulation of oxytocin and vasopressin may someday improve care for autism, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and WS. WS results when certain genes are absent because of a faulty recombination event during the development of sperm or egg cells.
Virtually everyone with WS has exactly the same set of genes missing (25 to 28 genes are missing from one of two copies of chromosome 7). “The genetic deficiencies allow researchers to examine the genetic and neuronal basis of social behavior,” said Ursula Bellugi, Ph.D., a co-author on the paper. “This study provides us with crucial information about genes and brain regions involved in the control of oxytocin and vasopressin, hormones that may play important roles in other disorders.”
Children with WS love people, despite being challenged with numerous health problems. Cognition and cannabis: from anecdote to advanced technology. John C. M. Brust + Author Affiliations Correspondence to: John C. M. Brust, Department of Neurology, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY, USA E-mail: jcb2@mail.cumc.columbia.edu Received May 28, 2012. Whether the use of cannabis causes lasting cognitive or behavioural alteration has been controversial for decades.
In this issue of Brain, Zalesky et al. (2012) apply a novel strategy—diffusion-weighted MRI and connectivity mapping—to demonstrate microstructural alterations affecting brain axonal pathways in long-term cannabis users. 'Trust' hormone oxytocin found at heart of rare genetic disorder. The hormone oxytocin - often referred to as the "trust" hormone or "love hormone" for its role in stimulating emotional responses - plays an important role in Williams syndrome (WS), according to a study published June 12, 2012, in PLoS One.
The study, a collaboration between scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of Utah, found that people with WS flushed with the hormones oxytocin and arginine vasopressin (AVP) when exposed to emotional triggers. The findings may help in understanding human emotional and behavioral systems and lead to new treatments for devastating illnesses such as WS, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and possibly even autism. "Williams syndrome results from a very clear genetic deletion, allowing us to explore the genetic and neuronal basis of social behavior," says Ursula Bellugi, the director of Salk's Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience and a co-author on the paper. In the new study, led by Dr. Julie R. Are Atheists More Autistic Than Believers? In most religions, and arguably anything worth being called a religion , God is not just an impersonal force or creator. He has a mind that humans can relate to.
Maybe you’re not gossiping on the phone with him late at night, but he has personality traits, thoughts, moods, and ways of communicating with you. If you didn’t know what a mind was or how it worked, not only would you not understand people, you would not understand God, and you would not be religious. That’s the theory, anyway. But first, the existing evidence. Jesse Bering, in a 2002 paper , noted that in autobiographical accounts written by people with high-functioning autism , God is more a principle than a person. In line with such a conception of the divine, Simon Baron-Cohen, who proposed the mindblindness theory of autism, told me that “sometimes I meet people with autism who are religious, but their motivation is driven more by the rules (the system) in theology rather than the anthropomorphizing.”
Cognition and behavior: Reward circuit abnormal in autism — SFARI. Click to enlarge image Paying attention: Researchers paired a cognitive task with different rewards to look at activity in the reward center of the brain in children with autism. The reward center of the brain is less active in children with autism compared with controls in response both to praise and monetary rewards, according to a study published 11 April in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience1. The results suggest that there is an overall deficit in the brain’s reward circuitry in autism and that it is not specific to social stimuli. This finding is in contrast to a 2010 study showing that children with autism have less brain activity than do controls in areas of the brain that process a sense of reward, and that this effect is especially pronounced in response to social, as opposed to monetary, rewards. The children performed a cognitive task that tested their ability to respond to and hold off on responding to a visual cue. 1: Kohls G. et al.
Turning Kanner’s model of autism upside-down « what is autism anyway? Kanner’s model of autism should be turned on its head. The idea that Kanner’s syndrome was caused by a fundamental impairment in social interaction has prevented us discovering the causes of autism. Those are quite bold claims. In the next couple of posts I’ll explain why I made them. Previously, I suggested that Kanner was using two theoretical frameworks to analyse the behaviour of the 11 children with his unique syndrome; Kraepelin’s classification of mental disorders and psychodynamic theory. Kanner’s comments imply that he interpreted abnormalities in feeding, speech and movement in social and sexual terms because of the psychodynamic framework.
I want to look more closely at psychodynamic theory and explain my claim that viewing Kanner’s syndrome as caused by a fundamental impairment in social interaction has proved an obstacle to research into the causes of autism. How the brain works: the psychodynamic model How the brain works: the information-processing model 1. 2. 3. Like this: The genetics of autism spectrum disorders. Autism is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder, marked by multiple symptoms that include atypicalities in: social interactions (ie people with autism would often find it difficult to understand others' mental states and emotions, and respond accordingly) verbal and non-verbal communication repetitive behaviour (ie people with autism might repeat certain words or actions over and over, usually in a rigid rule-governed manner). There is a wide variability in the degree to which these symptoms manifest themselves, leading to the use of the term 'autism spectrum disorders' (ASD).
While 'autism', as originally described by Leo Kanner in 1943, represents an extreme end of the spectrum, often marked by severe impairments in one or more of these three domains described above, other manifestations of these symptoms are sometimes associated with diagnostic labels such as 'Asperger syndrome', ‘atypical autism’ or ‘pervasive developmental disorder – not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS)’. Figure 1: Autism, Ethics and the Good Life: an introduction | Penumbrage. Monday 2nd April was World Autism Day and to mark the occasion I attended a conference at the Royal Academy entitled Autism, Ethics and the Good Life. The conference was convened by Pat Walsh, Centre of Medical Law and Ethics, King’s College London and Professor Francesca Happé, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, with support from the British Academy.
The demand for places was such that the conference had to relocate from the British Academy to a larger venue at the Royal Academy. The programme was impressive. All of the sixteen speakers and chairs had a professional engagement with autism. Eight had a familial connection: five parents, one grandparent and two diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder. Additionally, one speaker declared herself to be the parent of a child with severe cognitive impairments.Franscesca Happé is a professor of cognitive neuroscience. Priorities for Research. The discussion that followed focused mainly on the issues raised by Cadman.
Cold and Lonely. Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold? Abstract Metaphors such as icy stare depict social exclusion using cold-related concepts; they are not to be taken literally and certainly do not imply reduced temperature. Two experiments, however, revealed that social exclusion literally feels cold. Experiment 1 found that participants who recalled a social exclusion experience gave lower estimates of room temperature than did participants who recalled an inclusion experience. In Experiment 2, social exclusion was directly induced through an on-line virtual interaction, and participants who were excluded reported greater desire for warm food and drink than did participants who were included. These findings are consistent with the embodied view of cognition and support the notion that social perception involves physical and perceptual content. Article Notes Received January 3, 2008.
. © 2008 Association for Psychological Science. Seth Mnookin: Autism Roundtable: Cross-Disability Solidarity, Goals for the Future, and What it Means to "Fit in" Note: This is the second part of a feature that began two days ago on the Public Library of Science. The introduction to both parts is identical. It's been almost four years since I began work researching and reporting on autism. The bulk of that work was focused on my book The Panic Virus, which examines the spurious fears over a connection between vaccines and autism. (There's more information about the book, including a summary and links to reviews, on my website.) One thing I did not get to address is how dramatically my own conception of autism has evolved. I asked some of the people who've influenced my thinking about all of these issues to collaborate on a virtual roundtable. Shannon Des Roches Rosa -- Shannon is one of the powerhouses behind the invaluable website The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism; last month, Shannon and her collaborators released an incredible book by the same name.
John: I was asked how I might change myself to fit in. Ari: Very worthwhile goals, Todd. Prenatal testosterone linked to increased risk of language delay for male infants, study shows. Why Do People Yawn? You're more likely to catch a yawn from a relative than a stranger. Model empathy — SFARI. Trained Peers Better at Aiding Autistic Kids with Social Skills. Using Skin-Cell Research to Probe Cellular Basis of Autism.
How Mutations May Lead to Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder. Autistic Brains Grow More Slowly. IQ Testing Underestimates Autism Spectrum Intelligence. Lost and Tired » 10 Things my Autistic kids wished you knew. New Genetic Links Found Between Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder. Genetic Link Between Epilepsy and Schizophrenia. Children with autism demonstrate superior change detection skills. The Autism Crisis. The curious case of the reversed pronoun. PTSD Impairs Detection of Emotional Cues. Study finds new ADHD genes, links susceptibility with autism and other neuropsychiatric conditions. Baroness Greenfield's contribution to autism science.
Does X Mark the Spot for ASD? Rearranging the Introversion-Extroversion Schema. New brain imaging research reveals why autistic individuals confuse pronouns. How the brain assigns objects to categories. Social deficits associated with autism, schizophrenia induced in mice with new technology. Brain Connectivity, Or Head Movement?
People at darker, higher latitudes evolved bigger eyes and brains | Science. Brain Imaging Can Diagnose Autism in Most Infants. Older people find it harder to see the wood for the trees. Your Bad Teacher Experiences Can Make Your Child’s Teachers Better. Speed limit on babies' vision. ARC: Whats New. Biomarker for autism discovered. Autism research centre. Infants learn to transfer knowledge by 16 months, study finds. Rhesus monkeys have a form of self awareness not previously attributed to them. This picture will make it more likely that you'll seek help. The Role of Anxiety Master. Researchers find master switch for adult epilepsy.
A neuropsychological perspective on procrastination. Natural approach to treating child’s autism shows promise. Why Celebrities Like Katy Perry Don’t Want People to Make Eye Contact. Love Hurts…For Real. Each Half of the Brain Has Its Own Memory Storage | 80beats. Brain Basis for Emotion Recognition Deficits in Depression.
Sight requires exact pattern of neural activity to be wired in the womb. Weaker brain 'sync' may be early sign of autism. Face-blindness solution found by Ayrshire optician. Toddlers won't bother learning from you if you're daft. How we come to know our bodies as our own. Does Everyone Have ADD? Concentration Interruptus and "Pseudo ADD" It's Different for Girls. Monkeys might be more logical than we think. Field Guide to the Loner: The Real Insiders. New study locates the source of key brain function. Babies Are Capable of Complex Reasoning | Infant Cognition & Development.
Pervasive microstructural abnormalities in autism: a DTI study. Why Do Autistics Score Poorly On The Eyes Test? Aspergers, Bullying and Self-advocacy. Scientists Afflict Computers with Schizophrenia to Better Understand the Human Brain. Why people with schizophrenia may have trouble reading social cues. Genetic variations of the melatonin pathway in patients with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders - Chaste - Journal of Pineal Research. Language learning: Researchers use video games to crack the speech code. Genetic Mutations Linked to Autistic Spectrum Disorders. Tiny variation in one gene may have led to crucial changes in human brain. Aspergirls. Imagine A World Where Aspergers Was The Norm.
Researchers take major step toward first biological test for autism. Children with autism have distinctive patterns of brain activity | Science. Study: Autism affects all brain functions. Study finds children with autism have mitochondrial dysfunction. What makes a face look alive? Study says it's in the eyes (w/ Video) Autistic brains "organised differently" say scientists. Brain research sheds light on improved vision among autism patients. Visual Detection And Identification More Active In Autistic Brain Than Thought Control And Actions.