Download or read book Deficits in Social Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorders and Their Electro cortical Correlates a Multisensory Integration Perspective written by Maria Elena Stefanou and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Autism The Movement Perspective written by Elizabeth B Torres and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is portrayed as cognitive and social disorders. Undoubtedly, impairments in communication and restricted-repetitive behaviors that now define the disorders have a profound impact on social interactions. But can we go beyond the descriptive, observational nature of this definition and objectively measure that amalgamate of motions and sensations that we call behavior? In this Research Topic we bring movement and its sensation to the forefront of autism research, diagnosis, and treatment. We gather researchers across disciplines with the unifying goal of recognizing movement and sensory disturbances as core symptoms of the disorder. We also hear confirmation from the perspective of autism self-advocates and parents. Those important sources of evidence along with the research presented in this topic demonstrate without a doubt that profound movement and sensory differences do exist in ASD and that they are quantifiable. The work presented in this Research Topic shows us that quantifiable differences in movements have a better chance than current observational techniques to help us uncover subtle solutions that the nervous system with autism has already spontaneously self-discovered and utilized in daily living. Where the naked eye would miss the unique subtleties that help each individual cope, instrumentation and fine kinematic analyses of motions help us uncover inherent capacities and predispositions of the person with autism. The work presented in this topic helps us better articulate through the voices of parents and self-advocates those sensory motor differences that current inventories could not possibly uncover. These differences are seldom perceived as they take place at timescales and frequencies that fall largely beneath our conscious awareness. To the person in the spectrum living with this disorder and to the caregiver creating accommodations to help the affected loved one, these subtleties are very familiar though. Indeed they are often used in clever ways to facilitate daily routines. We have waited much too long in science to listen to the very people that we are trying to define, understand and help. Being autism a social problem by definition, it is remarkable that not a single diagnosis inventory measures the dyadic social interaction that takes place between the examiner and the examinees. Indeed we have conceived the autistic person within a social context where we are incapable –by definition– of accepting those differences. The burden is rather placed on the affected person to whom much too often we refer to in the third person as “non-verbal, without intentionality, without empathy or emotions, without a theory of mind”, among other purely psychological guesses. It is then too easy and shockingly allowed to “reshape” that person, to mold that person to better conform to our social expectations and to extinguish “behaviors” that are socially unacceptable, even through the use of aversive punishing reinforcement techniques if need be. And yet none of those techniques have had a single shred of objective scientific evidence of their effectiveness. We have not objectively measured once, nor have we physiologically characterized once any of those perceived features that we so often use to observationally define what we may think the autistic phenotype may be. We have not properly quantified, beyond paper-and-pencil methods, the effectiveness of interventions in autism. Let us not forget when we do our science, that we are all part of the broad human spectrum.
Download or read book Understanding Other Minds written by Simon Baron-Cohen and published by . This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over its previous two editions, Understanding Other Minds has established itself as a classic text on autism and theory of mind. In the 15 years since the last edition was prepared, the neuroimaging literature on "theory of mind" has expanded significantly, revealing new brain regions and their role in regard to "theory of mind". Other major changes include developments in the study of infants and in the fields of hormones and genetics. Such studies have revealed evidence of both heritability (from twin studies), some molecular genetic associations, and a specific role for both sex steroid hormones (such as foetal testosterone) and neuropeptide hormones, such as oxytocin. The new edition brings together an international team of leading writers and researchers from psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy to present a state-of-the-art review of scientific research in this important field - one that will be essential for all those involved in the fields of developmental psychology and neuroscience, as well as psychiatrists and philosophers.
Download or read book Social Interactions in Autism written by Helena Hartmann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helena Hartmann examines the crucial concepts of cognitive empathy, emotional egocentricity and social pain of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). She thereby provides valuable insights into the investigation of social cognition of both the neurotypical as well as autistic population. Since past research has revealed that individuals with ASD often face problems regarding cognitive empathy, they might also exhibit more difficulties in correctly classifying and distinguishing feelings of themselves and other people. In order to verify this hypothesis, one group with and one without ASD underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while playing Cyberball, a virtual ball-toss game known to create feelings of social inclusion or exclusion. These findings should not only expand former research but also contribute to a better understanding of the social and emotional impairments of this group.
Download or read book Social Cognition written by Tricia Striano and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2009 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we perceive and interpret the actions of others is crucial if we are to develop into healthy adults. It has even been argued that a lack of social cognitive skills lays a strong foundation for a variety of atypical developmental disorders, including autism. Fortunately, our understanding of how humans process and interpret each other's actions has increased by leaps and bounds in the past decade. At the vanguard of these encouraging developments has been groundbreaking research in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and autism. Social Cognition: Development, Neuroscience and Autism is the first volume to fully integrate these areas of cutting-edge research on social cognition through contributions from some of the world's foremost experts in all three disciplines. The text is edited by distinguished development specialists who preface each section with chapter by chapter summaries that seamlessly link each of the contributing essays. Sections include related chapters on perspectives on social cognition, social cognition during infancy, social cognition and the adult brain, and social cognition: the challenge of autism. The text's final section serves as a commentary highlighting the fundamental issues that have been addressed in the text. Social Cognition: Development, Neuroscience and Autism is an indispensable addition to the rapidly expanding field of social cognition—and will provide valuable new insights on how we think and learn.
Download or read book The Sensory Accommodation Framework for Technology written by LouAnne Boyd and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-02-02 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a thorough introduction to the many facets of designing technologies for autism, with a particular focus on optimizing visual attention frameworks. This book is designed to provide a detailed overview of several aspects of technology for autism. Each Chapter illustrates different parts of the Sensory Accommodation Framework and provides examples of relevant available technologies. The books first discusses a variety of skills that make up human development as well as a history of autism as a diagnosis and the birth of the neurodiversity movement. It goes on to detail individual types of therapy and how they interact with autism. The systems involved in sensory processing and their specific relation to autism are then explored, including through technologies that have addressed these areas and applications for designers. Readers will learn about designing sensory environments and sensory interactions, such as through virtual reality. This book places a needed emphasis on the hierarchy of information in technology development by exploring visual attention in neurodivergent conditions like autism, ADHD, and dyslexia. It also delves into the relationship between sensory perception and nonverbal communication, the bridge between sensory input and social behavior, and dynamic information. The discussion is rounded out with examinations of temporal processing as and multisensory integration as complicating factors that have existing technological solutions. Finally, the book closes with a summary of the sensory accommodation framework in respect to how each layer offers different user experience goals and specific mechanisms to promote those goals. Readers from a variety of research backgrounds will find this book informative and useful, while designers will learn essential skills for effectively designing autism technologies.
Download or read book Neural Effects of a Cognitive behavioral Social Skills Treatment on Gaze Processing in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder written by Karim Ibrahim (Psy.D. candidate at the University of Hartford) and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social deficits are a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and have been associated with underactivity in brain regions important for social cognition. Social skills training using a cognitive-behavioral (CBT) approach has been shown to improve social behavior in children with ASD. However, little is known about the neural response to treatment. In the present study, we used functional MRI to examine the neural correlates of gaze processing in ASD following a CBT-based social skills group. Verbally fluent children (ages 8-11) were randomized to CBT or a facilitated play comparison group. Behavioral assessments and fMRI were conducted at baseline, endpoint (12 weeks), and at a 3-month follow-up. While undergoing fMRI, children viewed images of emotionally expressive faces with either a direct or averted gaze. Regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the relationship between changes in brain activity and baseline participant characteristics, and to evaluate neural predictors and moderators of changes in social cognition and behavior. Following treatment, the CBT group showed greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) relative to baseline. In contrast, the comparison group did not show any regions of increased activity post-intervention. When directly comparing the two groups, the CBT group showed greater increases in the MPFC, implicated in mentalizing, relative to comparison. Greater increases in MPFC and VLPFC activity following treatment were associated with older baseline age for the CBT group. Baseline activity in the FG predicted response to treatment. Specifically, children with greater baseline activation of the FG demonstrated improvements on measures of social competence including the social awareness subscale of the Social Responsiveness Scale and a social cognition composite. Findings suggest that a cognitive-behavioral approach to social skills treatment may increase activity in social brain networks in verbally fluent children with ASD. In addition, children who demonstrated a more typical neural response to faces at baseline (i.e., increased FG activity) were responders to treatment. This study contributes to our understanding of the plasticity of networks involved in social cognition and neural biomarkers of treatment response.
Download or read book Learning and Cognition in Autism written by Eric Schopler and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first-of-its-kind volume describes the cognitive and educational characteristics of people with autism. Leading experts in the field contribute papers to this book, explaining intervention techniques and strategies. Parents, researchers, professionals, and clinicians interested in educating people with autism will appreciate this volume.
Download or read book Brain Connectivity in Autism written by Rajesh K. Kana and published by Frontiers E-books. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brain's ability to process information crucially relies on connectivity. Understanding how the brain processes complex information and how such abilities are disrupted in individuals with neuropsychological disorders will require an improved understanding of brain connectivity. Autism is an intriguingly complex neurodevelopmental disorder with multidimensional symptoms and cognitive characteristics. A biological origin for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) had been proposed even in the earliest published accounts (Kanner, 1943; Asperger, 1944). Despite decades of research, a focal neurobiological marker for autism has been elusive. Nevertheless, disruptions in interregional and functional and anatomical connectivity have been a hallmark of neural functioning in ASD. Theoretical accounts of connectivity perceive ASD as a cognitive and neurobiological disorder associated with altered functioning of integrative circuitry. Neuroimaging studies have reported disruptions in functional connectivity (synchronization of activated brain areas) during cognitive tasks and during task-free resting states. While these insights are valuable, they do not address the time-lagged causality and directionality of such correlations. Despite the general promise of the connectivity account of ASD, inconsistencies and methodological differences among studies call for more thorough investigations. A comprehensive neurological account of ASD should incorporate functional, effective, and anatomical connectivity measures and test the diagnostic utility of such measures. In addition, questions pertaining to how cognitive and behavioral intervention can target connection abnormalities in ASD should be addressed. This research topic of the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience addresses “Brain Connectivity in Autism” primarily from cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging perspectives.
Download or read book Assessing Social Support and Stress in Autism Focused Virtual Communities Emerging Research and Opportunities written by Saha, Amit and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2018-05-18 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the high prevalence of autism spectrum disorders among the younger generation, there is a shortage of adequate resources to deliver care for these individuals. Therefore, social media and online forums help create a sense of community and a sense of social network, where members provide support for each other. Assessing Social Support and Stress in Autism-Focused Virtual Communities: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical reference volume featuring the latest academic research on online communities and how using social media can provide stress relief for families and individuals diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Including coverage among a variety of applicable viewpoints and subjects such as social media concepts, stress relief, and healthcare communities, this book is ideally designed for academics and practitioners as well as healthcare professionals, researchers, students, academics, and practitioners looking for innovative research on autism spectrum disorders.
Download or read book Electro cortical Correlates of Autistic Spectrum Disorder written by Veerashree Salvi and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Examining the Neurological Underpinnings of Atypical Multisensory Perception in Autism Spectrum Disorders written by Stephanie Lindsey-Marie Lavoie and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been found to have difficulties with multisensory perception, which would have a significant impact on their cognitive, sensory, language, and social development. The current collection of studies sought to understand the neurological mechanisms underlying this difficulty with multisensory perception across temporal synchrony variations using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The nature of these multisensory processing deficits were further explored by delineating social and linguistic processing. The overall goal was accomplished by examining multisensory processing in three studies. The first study evaluated and compared various methods of identifying brain regions responsible for multisensory integration in 17 young adults without ASD. This first study found that a newly proposed temporal synchrony method, which compares neural responses to temporally synchronous and asynchronous audiovisual stimuli, was more theoretically valid and more empirically tenable than other previously used methods. In the second study, the temporal synchrony method was used to compare responses to multisensory stimuli across social-linguistic, social-nonlinguistic, and nonsocial-nonlinguistic conditions in individuals with (n = 15) and without (n = 17) ASD using fMRI. The third study explored whole-brain patterns of activity involved in multisensory integration, using a multivariate fMRI analysis approach (partial least squares: PLS) with the same participant groups as study two. Taken together the results of studies two and three reveal that young adults with ASD do not process multisensory stimuli in the same way as young adults without ASD. When using targeted contrasts in study two, individuals with ASD displayed either a lack of multisensory integration or an opposite pattern of response to synchrony variants of multisensory information relative to the group without ASD. Further, the results of study three suggested that when examining synchronous and asynchronous multisensory stimuli, individuals with ASD do not engage the same social- and language-specific networks that were present in individuals without ASD. Based on the results of these studies, a novel hypothesis was proposed to explain the differential response profiles for individuals with and without ASD: the multisensory catalyst nodes hypothesis.
Download or read book Social Cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder written by Martha Noone and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Multisensory Integration of Low level Non social Information in Autism Spectrum Disorder written by Vanessa Bao and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In addition to difficulties regarding social communication and interaction, sensory abnormalities are present in the majority of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and this characteristic feature is part of the diagnostic criteria for ASD. Given the observed abnormalities in sensory reactivity, processing and perception, it has been suggested that the ability to integrate sensory information may be altered in ASD. Specifically, the ability to integrate information from more than one sensory modality at once, or Multisensory Integration (MSI) has been identified as potentially disrupted in ASD. In fact, altered MSI is thought to contribute to core behavioural features of ASD. Although this area of research in the field of ASD has gained some momentum, much of the evidence for altered MSI comes from studies that use socio-communicative stimuli (i.e., faces and voices). The current dissertation proposed to address this issue by evaluating MSI using 2 tasks void of socio-communicative content in order to remove the confounding effects of social stimuli on interpreting MSI data. Another goal was to broaden the age range investigated by including adults and adolescents in the two studies. In Study 1, the ability to integrate auditory and visual information was evaluated in adults and adolescents with (n=20) and without ASD (n=20) using the Flash-Beep Illusion task. Both the ASD and the Typically-Developing (TD) groups were shown to have similar susceptibility to the fission illusion. However, the ASD group was significantly more susceptible to the fusion illusion. Results suggest that individuals with ASD show evidence of MSI on the flash-beep illusion task but that their integration of audiovisual sensory information may be more dependent on temporal factors and less selective than for TD individuals. In a second study (Study 2), multisensory facilitation of simple lower-level stimuli was evaluated in adolescents and adults with (n=20) and without ASD (n=19) using a reaction time (RT) paradigm. Reaction time in response to visual-only, auditory-only and multisensory audiovisual trials was compared in both groups. The race model analysis indicated that the race model violation occurred only for the TD group, not the ASD group. In other words, the ASD group did not demonstrate significant multisensory facilitation during the reaction time task whereas the TD group did. These results suggest that MSI is altered in ASD, even for information void of social content or complexity. Individuals with ASD may not benefit from the advantage conferred by multisensory stimulation to the same extent as TD individuals.These findings, taken together provide support for the hypothesis that MSI is altered in ASD and that this alteration may be, at least in part, driving some of the socio-communicative deficits and restricted or repetitive behaviours and interests in ASD. The results are interpreted within the context of cognitive theories of ASD, and future directions for research and intervention are proposed in light of these findings." --
Download or read book Attentional Contributions to Social Cognition and Social Behaviors written by Jessica Lee Bean and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Autism Spectrum Disorders written by David Amaral and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 1445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autism is an emerging area of basic and clinical research, and has only recently been recognized as a major topic in biomedical research. Approximately 1 in 150 children are diagnosed as autistic, so it is also an intense growth area in behavioral and educational treatments. Financial resources have begun to be raised for more comprehensive research and an increasing number of scientists are becoming involved in autism research. In many respects, autism has become a model for conducting translational research on a psychiatric disorder. This text provides a comprehensive summary of all current knowledge related to the behavioral, experiential, and biomedical features of the autism spectrum disorders including major behavioral and cognitive syndromology, common co-morbid conditions, neuropathology, neuroimmunology, and other neurological correlates such as seizures, allergy and immunology, gastroenterology, infectious disease, and epidemiology. Edited by three leading researchers, this volume contains over 80 chapters and nine shorter commentaries by thought leaders in the field, making the book a virtual "who's who" of autism research. This carefully developed book is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for what we know in this area as well as a guidepost for the next several years in all areas of autism research.
Download or read book Social Cognition and Comorbidity in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Attention deficit Hyperactivity Disorder written by Elyse Marie Manteris and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
