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S Baron-Cohen

Publications and source records attributed to S Baron-Cohen.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
PubMed1998

The frequency and distribution of spontaneous attention shifts between social and nonsocial stimuli in autistic, typically developing, and nonautistic developmentally delayed infants.

Spontaneous shifts of attention were observed in autistic, typically developing, and nonautistic developmentally delayed infants. Three types of attention shifting behaviour were observed; (1) between an object and another object, (2) between an object and a person, and (3) between a person and another person. The two control groups shifted attention more frequently between an object and a person than between an object and another object or between a person and another person. The infants with autism showed a different pattern, shifting attention between an object and another object more than any other type of shift. Furthermore, infants with autism showed fewer shifts of attention between an object and a person, and between person and person, than did the two control groups. They also spent less time overall looking at people and looked more briefly at people and for longer durations at objects, compared to the two control groups. These results indicate an abnormality in social orientation in autism even at the early age of 20 months.

Attention↗
PubMed1998

Enhanced discrimination of novel, highly similar stimuli by adults with autism during a perceptual learning task.

High-functioning adults with autism and control adults were tested on a perceptual learning task that compared discrimination performance on familiar and novel stimuli. Control adults were better able to discriminate familiar than novel stimuli--the perceptual learning effect. No perceptual learning effect was observed in adults with autism although they discriminated the novel stimuli significantly better than control adults. This enhanced discrimination learning about novel, but not familiar, stimuli in autism is discussed in relation to two current hypotheses of information processing in autism--weak central coherence and reduced attention-switching--and a new third hypothesis, which suggests that features held in common between stimuli are processed poorly and features unique to a stimulus are processed well in autism.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Enhanced visual search for a conjunctive target in autism: a research note.

Children with and without autism were compared on two visual search tasks in which a letter target appeared among two sets of letter distracters. In one task, the target shared colour with one set of distracters but was unique in shape--the feature search task. In the other, the conjunctive search task, the target shared colour with one set and shape with another set of distracters. Although search was slower in the conjunctive task than the feature task in normally developing control children, children with autism showed no significant slowing in reaction time in the conjunctive task and were faster than control children in this task. This result is discussed in the light of theories of visual search which state that rate of search is determined by the degree of similarity between target and distracters.

Attention↗
PubMed1997

Does teaching theory of mind have an effect on the ability to develop conversation in children with autism?

The present research examined whether teaching children with autism to pass tasks that assess mental state understanding had any positive effects on communication. Two aspects of communication previously shown to be deficient in children with autism were considered. These are conversational ability, in particular the ability to expand on conversation, and the use of mental state terms in speech. Results showed that no discernible improvement was seen on either measure of communication following mental state teaching. Discussion centers on real versus superficial changes in understanding mental states as a result of teaching.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1997

Infants with autism: an investigation of empathy, pretend play, joint attention, and imitation.

Systematic studies of infants with autism have not been previously carried out. Taking advantage of a new prospective screening instrument for autism in infancy (S. Baron-Cohen et al., 1996), the present study found that, compared with developmentally delayed and normally developing children, 20-month-old children with autism were specifically impaired on some aspects of empathy, joint attention, and imitation. Infants with autism failed to use social gaze in the empathy and joint attention tasks. Both the infants with autism and the infants with developmental delay demonstrated functional play, but very few participants in either group produced spontaneous pretend play. In the developmental delay group, but not the autism group, pretend play was shown following prompting. The implications of these findings for developmental accounts of autism and for the early diagnosis of the disorder are discussed.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1997

Are people with autism and Asperger syndrome faster than normal on the Embedded Figures Test?

Previous work suggests children with autism show superior performance (in relation to their general mental age) on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). Frith interprets this as showing that they have "weak central coherence". In Experiment 1, using an adult level version of this task, we aimed to replicate and extend this finding, first, by collecting response time (RT) data; second, by testing adults with autism of normal intelligence; and third, by testing a group of adults with Asperger syndrome, in order to test for differences between autism and Asperger syndrome. Both clinical groups were significantly faster on the EFT. In Experiment 2, we investigated if this difference was due to a preference for local over global processing, using a novel drawing task based on the classical Rey Figure. The clinical groups did not differ significantly on this test, but there was a trend towards such a difference. Alternative explanations for the EFT superiority in autism and Asperger syndrome are considered.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Another advanced test of theory of mind: evidence from very high functioning adults with autism or asperger syndrome.

Previous studies have found a subgroup of people with autism or Asperger Syndrome who pass second-order tests of theory of mind. However, such tests have a ceiling in developmental terms corresponding to a mental age of about 6 years. It is therefore impossible to say if such individuals are intact or impaired in their theory of mind skills. We report the performance of very high functioning adults with autism or Asperger Syndrome on an adult test of theory of mind ability. The task involved inferring the mental state of a person just from the information in photographs of a person's eyes. Relative to age-matched normal controls and a clinical control group (adults with Tourette Syndrome), the group with autism and Asperger Syndrome were significantly impaired on this task. The autism and Asperger Syndrome sample was also impaired on Happé's strange stories tasks. In contrast, they were unimpaired on two control tasks: recognising gender from the eye region of the face, and recognising basic emotions from the whole face. This provides evidence for subtle mindreading deficits in very high functioning individuals on the autistic continuum.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Do children with autism use the speaker's direction of gaze strategy to crack the code of language?

Normal toddlers infer the referent of a novel word by consulting the speaker's direction of gaze. That is, they use the Speaker's Direction of Gaze (SDG) strategy. This is a far more powerful strategy than the alternative, the Listener's Direction of Gaze (LDG) strategy. In Study 1 we tested if children with autism, who have well-documented impairments in joint attention, used the SDG or the LDG strategy to learn a novel word for a novel object. Results showed that although 70.6% of children with mental handicap passed the test by making the correct mapping between a novel word and a novel object, via the SDG strategy, only 29.4% of children with autism did so. Instead, their reliance on the LDG strategy led to mapping errors. In Study 2 a group of normal children, whose chronological age (24 months old) was equated with the verbal mental age of the 2 clinical groups in Study 1, was tested using a similar procedure. Results showed that 79% of this normal group passed the test by making the correct mapping between a novel word and a novel object using the SDG strategy. Taken together, the results from both studies suggest that children with autism are relatively insensitive to a speaker's gaze direction as an index of the speaker's intention to refer. This result is consistent with previous findings showing that children with autism are relatively "blind" to the mentalistic significance of the eyes. Discussion centers on how the absence of an SDG strategy might disrupt specific aspects of language development in autism.

Attention↗
PubMed1997

Hey! It was just a joke! Understanding propositions and propositional attitudes by normally developing children and children with autism.

Two- and three-year-old children were asked why a speaker named objects falsely. Most produced explanations in terms of the speaker's intention to joke. This implies a sensitivity to two distinct levels in language: the proposition itself and the propositional attitude. Children with learning difficulties showed a similar competence. In contrast, most children with autism failed to explain such false statements in these terms, instead merely describing them as "wrong." This was not simply due to a metalinguistic deficit, as they correctly answered questions about what a speaker had said the object was. These results suggest the normally developing toddler has a remarkable facility in processing propositional attitudes, while children with autism do not; and that such an ability is broadly independent of general intelligence.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Are children with autism deaf to gricean maxims?

Department of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK High-functioning children with autism show a severe deficit in the development of pragmatics whereas their knowledge of syntax and morphology is relatively intact. In this study we investigated further their selective communication impairment by comparing them with children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing children. We used a pragmatic task that involved the detection of utterances that violate conversational maxims (avoid redundancy, be informative, truthful, relevant, and polite). Most children with autism performed at chance on this task, whereas all children with SLI and all normal controls performed above chance. In addition, the success of children with autism on the pragmatics task was related to their ability to attribute false beliefs. These results are consistent with the idea that communication deficits in autism result from a selective impairment in representing propositional attitudes. Their implications for domain-specific views of cognitive development are discussed.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1996

What's inside someone's head? Conceiving of the mind as a camera helps children with autism acquire an alternative to a theory of mind.

A group of children with autism were taught a specific strategy to help them solve a series of theory of mind problems. We focused our teaching on the false-belief task and taught them the analogy that people have photos in their heads. This strategy draws on a domain of intact cognition in autism (understanding photographic representations) to bypass a cognitive impairment in a certain domain (understanding mental state representations). All the children were able to understand photographic misrepresentation during teaching and, following specific teaching, they could use the strategy of visualising photos in characters' heads to predict the character's behaviour. In contrast, none of the children could use the photo strategy to predict a character's mental states. The educational and theoretical implications of this study are discussed.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1996

Synaesthesia: prevalence and familiality.

Synaesthesia is a condition in which a mixing of the senses occurs; for example, sounds trigger the experience of colour. Previous reports suggest this may be familial, but no systematic studies exist. In addition, there are no reliable prevalence or sex-ratio figures for the condition, which is essential for establishing if the reported sex ratio (female bias) is reliable, and if this implicates a sex-linked genetic mechanism. Two independent population studies were conducted in the city of Cambridge, England (studies 1 and 2 here), as necessary background to the family genetic study of synaesthesia (study 3). Studies 1 and 2 arrived at an almost identical prevalence rate for synaesthesia: approximately 1 case in 2000. The sex ratio found was 6:1 (female:male). A third of cases also reported familial aggregation. In study 3 six families were examined, and first-degree relatives were tested for genuineness of the condition. All six families were indeed multiplex for synaesthesia. Alternative modes of inheritance are discussed.

Chromosome Aberrations↗
PubMed1996

Psychological markers in the detection of autism in infancy in a large population.

BACKGROUND: Investigation to see if there are key psychological risk indicators for autism in a random population study of children at 18 months of age; and to assess how well these discriminate children who receive a diagnosis of autism from other forms of developmental delay. METHOD: Sixteen thousand children in the southeast of England were screened for autism by their health visitor or GP, during their routine 18-month-old developmental check-up, using the CHAT (Checklist for Autism in Toddlers). From a previous high-risk study we predicted that children at 18 months of age who failed three items ('protodeclarative pointing', 'gaze-monitoring', and 'pretend play') would be at risk for receiving a diagnosis of autism. From other evidence, we further predicted that those 18-month-olds who failed one or two of the key items (either pretend play, or protodeclarative pointing and pretend play) would be at risk for developmental delay without autism. RESULTS: Twelve children out of the total population of 16,000 consistently failed the three key items. Of these, 10 (83.3%) received a diagnosis of autism. Thus, the false positive rate was 16.6% (2 out of 12 cases), and even these 2 cases were not normal. When the 10 children with autism were reassessed at 3.5 years of age, their diagnosis remained the same. Thus the false positive rate among the cases diagnosed with autism was zero. In contrast, of 22 children who consistently failed either protodeclarative pointing and/or pretend play, none received a diagnosis of autism, but 15 (68.2%) received a diagnosis of language delay. CONCLUSIONS: Consistent failure of the three key items from the CHAT at 18 months of age carries an 83.3% risk of autism; and this pattern of risk indicator is specific to autism when compared to other forms of developmental delay.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1995

Synaesthesia: reconciling the subjective with the objective.

Coloured hearing synaesthesia (from the Greek syn (union) and aisthesis (sensation)), has been known to the scientific community for over 300 years and yet has gone relatively uninvestigated. This review charts recent progress in the investigation of synaesthesia and discusses the consequences of this research for our understanding of the condition.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed1995

The physiology of coloured hearing. A PET activation study of colour-word synaesthesia.

In a small proportion of the normal population, stimulation in one modality can lead to perceptual experience in another, a phenomenon known as synaesthesia. In the most common form of synaesthesia, hearing a word can result in the experience of colour. We have used the technique of PET, which detects brain activity as changes of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF), to study the physiology of colour-word synaesthesia in a group of six synaesthete women. During rCBF measurements synaesthetes and six controls were blindfolded and were presented with spoken words or pure tones. Auditory word, but not tone, stimulation triggered synaesthesia in synaesthetes. In both groups word stimulation compared with tone stimulation activated the classical language areas of the perisylvian regions. In synaesthetes, a number of additional visual associative areas, including the posterior inferior temporal cortex and the parieto-occipital junctions, were activated. The former has been implicated in the integration of colour with shape and in verbal tasks which require attention to visual features of objects to which words refer. Synaesthetes also showed activations in the right prefrontal cortex, insula and superior temporal gyrus. By contrast, no significant activity was detected in relatively lower visual areas, including areas V1, V2 and V4. These results suggest that colour-word synaesthesia may result from the activity of brain areas concerned with language and visual feature integration. In the case of colour-word synaesthesia, conscious visual experience appears to occur without activation of the primary visual cortex.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Treating people as objects, agents, or "subjects": how young children with and without autism make requests.

A procedure previously used to investigate imperative communication in non-human primates was applied to young children, some of whom had autism. The goal was to examine closely how requests are made in a problem-solving situation. Each child's spontaneous strategies to obtain an out-of-reach object were analyzed in terms of the ways in which he or she used the adult who was present. Results showed that fewer children with autism used a strategy of treating the person as a "subject", and that more children with autism used object-centred strategies.

Adult↗