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S Baron-Cohen

Publications and source records attributed to S Baron-Cohen.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
PubMed1994

Can children with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome edit their intentions?

In this paper we describe a cognitive mechanism, the Intention Editor, which is triggered whenever there are several intentions competing in parallel with each other. This mechanism is hypothesized to be a subcomponent of a larger mechanism, the Supervisory Attentional System (SAS: Shallice, 1988) which serves inhibition in general. The Intention Editor interrupts one of several simultaneously activated intentions, preventing it from executing its action, utterance, or thought. This mechanism appears to develop during the first five to six years of life. We propose that an impairment in the development of this mechanism may account for the triad of symptoms in children with Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome (GTS): involuntary movements, involuntary utterances, and obsessive thoughts. This mechanism is tested with normal children aged 3-6 years old, and with children with GTS, in two experiments. In Experiment 1, subjects were required to make one hand movement while inhibiting making a (different) hand movement that the other hand was simultaneously making. In Experiment 2, they were asked to say one thing while inhibiting saying something else. On both tasks, normal 6-year-olds were significantly better than normal 4-year-olds, but children with GTS performed worse than normal 6-year-olds, despite having a mean age of 12 years. These results constitute preliminary evidence for the theory that the Intention Editor is dysfunctional in GTS.

Child↗
PubMed1994

Recognition of mental state terms. Clinical findings in children with autism and a functional neuroimaging study of normal adults.

BACKGROUND: The mind's ability to think about the mind has attracted substantial research interest in cognitive science in recent decades, as 'theory of mind'. No research has attempted to identify the brain basis of this ability, probably because it involves several separate processes. As a first step, we investigated one component process-the ability to recognise mental state terms. METHOD: In Experiment 1, we tested a group of children with autism (known to have theory of mind deficits) and a control group of children with mental handicap, for their ability to recognise mental state terms in a word list. This was to test if the mental state recognition task was related to traditional theory of mind tests. In Experiment 2, we investigated if in the normal brain, recognition of mental state terms might be localised. The procedure employed single photon emission computerised tomography (SPECT) in normal adult volunteers. We tested the prediction (based on available neurological and animal lesion studies) that there would be increased activation in the orbito-frontal cortex during this task, relative to a control condition, and relative to an adjacent frontal area (frontal-polar cortex). RESULTS: In Experiment 1, the group with autism performed significantly worse than the group without autism. In Experiment 2, there was increased cerebral blood flow during the mental state recognition task in the right orbito-frontal cortex relative to the left frontal-polar region. CONCLUSIONS: This simple mental state recognition task appears to relate to theory of mind, in that both are impaired in autism. The SPECT results implicate the orbito-frontal cortex as the basis of this ability.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1993

Coloured speech perception: is synaesthesia what happens when modularity breaks down?

Evidence was reported earlier from a single case that chromatic-lexical (CL) synaesthesia was a genuine phenomenon. A study is presented in which nine subjects were tested who also reported having coloured hearing. The following questions were addressed: (a) were these cases also genuine (ie consistent over time), (b) were they truly lexical, or rather variants of this condition, such as chromatic-graphemic (CG) or chromatic-phonemic (CP) synaesthesia, (c) did the experimental subjects show any commonalities between them, and (d) were they able to give information on a standard questionnaire about the phenomenology and ontogenesis of the condition? Subjects were asked to describe the colour sensation experienced on hearing items from a list of 130 words, phrases, and letters. The experimental group were not informed of any retest, but were retested more than one year later. A control group (n = 9), matched for IQ, memory, age, and gender, were read the same list and asked to associate a colour with each list item. They were informed at the time of testing that they would be retested on a sample of items from the list a week later. 92.3% of the responses of the experimental group when retested one year later were identical to those given in the original test, compared with only 37.6% of the control subjects' responses (retested one week later). This confirmed the genuinneess of these nine cases. All nine experimental subjects showed CG synaesthesia, none showing either CL or CP synaesthesia. Among the experimental group, some consistency was found in the colours evoked by hearing specific letters, suggesting the condition has a neurological basis.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1992

Handedness in childhood autism shows a dissociation of skill and preference.

Hand preference and hand skill were assessed in 20 children with autism, 20 normal controls and 12 children with mental retardation. 90% of the normal controls and 92% of the children with mental retardation showed concordance for hand preference and hand skill (i.e. the preferred hand was also the more skillful), whereas only 50% of the children with autism showed concordance of preference and skill, the remaining 50% preferring to use the hand which was less skillful. Children with autism also showed a lesser degree of handedness and a lesser degree of consistency than the other groups, although this was unrelated to the discordance of skill and asymmetry. A developmental model of handedness is proposed in which the development of handedness as preference is ontogenetically prior to the development of handedness as skill asymmetry, such that in normal children the development of skill asymmetry occurs as a secondary consequence of the establishment of preference. The causal sequence is disrupted in autism, so that although preference is established, it does not subsequently result in concordant skill asymmetry.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1992

Debate and argument: on modularity and development in autism: a reply to Burack.

Burack (this issue) reopens questions first raised by my 1989a article in this Journal, on whether children with autism have a specific delay in the development of a theory of mind, or whether the data reflect deviance rather than delay. His paper is of considerable value in highlighting points for debate. In my response, I focus on three issues: First, the logical possibility that delay and deviance can occur together. Second, the evidence that autism may instantiate this possibility. Finally, the important question of the modularity of theory of mind.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1992

Understanding drawings and beliefs: a further test of the metarepresentation theory of autism: a research note.

Leslie (1987, Psychological Review, 94, 412-426) proposed that the "theory of mind" deficit in autism was the result of a metarepresentation impairment. Studies employing False Photograph or Belief tests have shown that in autism the deficit is restricted to representing mental representations, and does not extend to representing pictorial representations. In this study, we tested this claim further using a False Drawing test. Subjects with autism performed at the same level as mentally handicapped or normal 4-year-old subjects on the False Drawing test, but significantly worse on the False Belief test. This confirmed the specificity of the deficit in autism.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1992

Out of sight or out of mind? Another look at deception in autism.

The penny-hiding game is a deception game that occurs naturally in parent-child and child-child interaction. It involves minimal linguistic demands, and is lots of fun. Oswald and Ollendick (1989) employed it with subjects with autism and reported an impaired capacity for deception. They also found that this correlated with performance on both a false belief ("theory of mind") test as well as various measures of social behaviour. The experiment reported here set out to replicate Oswald and Ollendick's important results, and then extend them by using a new technique for error analysis. We succeeded in replicating the autism-specific deception impairment as well as the finding that deception capacity correlates highly with performance on a false belief test. In addition, the new analytic technique discriminated the group with autism from controls more clearly than the traditional index of deception. Specifically, subjects with autism, whilst fully capable of enjoying the game as a game of object occlusion (keeping things out of sight), failed to perceive the game as a game of information occlusion (keeping things out of mind), unlike normal children or subjects with a mental handicap of an equivalent or lower mental age. The dissociation in autism between occluding objects vs occluding information is discussed in relation to other research showing that subjects with autism are impaired in understanding the principle that "seeing leads to knowing".

Adolescent↗
PubMed1992

Can autism be detected at 18 months? The needle, the haystack, and the CHAT.

Autism is currently detected only at about three years of age. This study aimed to establish if detection of autism was possible at 18 months of age. We screened 41 18-month-old toddlers who were at high genetic risk for developing autism, and 50 randomly selected 18-month-olds, using a new instrument, the CHAT, administered by GPs or health visitors. More than 80% of the randomly selected 18-month-old toddlers passed on all items, and none failed on more than one of pretend play, protodeclarative pointing, joint-attention, social interest, and social play. Four children in the high-risk group failed on two or more of these five key types of behaviour. At follow-up at 30 months of age, the 87 children who had passed four or more of these key types of behaviour at 18 months of age had continued to develop normally. The four toddlers who had failed on two or more of these key types of behaviour at 18 months received a diagnosis of autism by 30 months.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1991

The development of a theory of mind in autism: deviance and delay?

Subjects with autism show severe impairments in the ability to attribute beliefs to themselves and others, i.e., in their "theory of mind." An experimental investigation of the relative comprehension difficulty posed in representing different mental states is reported in this chapter, revealing that certain mental states are easier to recall than others, for all subjects. For example, see and want are easier than believe. But whereas for normal children imagine and pretend are as easy as see and want, for people with autism they are significantly more difficult. Gopnik and Slaughter's three-stage model of normal development of a theory of mind is replicated in the present experiment and found to fit the pattern of results for people with mental handicap but not the data from autism. Instead, the data from autism seem to fit a hypothesis of both deviance and delay in the development of a theory of mind.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

Do people with autism understand what causes emotion?

An experiment is described that tests whether people with autism understand some causes of 2 basic emotions (happiness and sadness). The causes of emotion tested were situations, desires, and beliefs. Results showed that, relative to normal and mentally handicapped subjects of an equivalent mental age, people with autism alone showed severe deficits in comprehension of emotion caused by beliefs. Their understanding of emotion caused by situations and desires was no different than the nonautistic mentally handicapped group. Thus, difficulties in understanding emotion by people with autism are most apparent when emotion interacts with false belief. The implications of these results for the affective and meta-representation theories of autism are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Are autistic children "behaviorists"? An examination of their mental-physical and appearance-reality distinctions.

This paper continues our earlier investigation of autistic children's deficit in attributing beliefs to others--in their "theory of mind." Three experiments are reported. The first tests the prediction that autistic children will fail to distinguish mental and physical entities. The second tests the prediction that they will also be unaware of the mental function of the brain. The third tests the prediction that they will be unable to take into account their own mental states. This latter prediction was tested using Appearance-Reality (A-R) tasks. All three predictions were supported. Deficits in these areas were not found among mentally handicapped or normal children of the same or lower mental and chronological age, suggesting that they may be autism-specific and independent of general developmental delay. It is argued that autistic children's failure to make A-R distinctions is consistent with Leslie's (1987) metarepresentation theory of autism.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

The autistic child's theory of mind: a case of specific developmental delay.

In previous tests of the lowest level of a "theory of mind" (i.e. first-order belief attribution), 80% of autistic children were found to be impaired relative to a non-autistic mentally-handicapped control group. The present study examines the 20% of autistic children who have a theory of mind at the lowest level, and tests their ability to use a theory of mind at higher levels (i.e. second-order belief attribution). This autistic subgroup, in comparison to Down's Syndrome and normal control groups, was found to be severely impaired at the higher level. Autism is discussed as a possible case of specific developmental delay.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Do autistic children have obsessions and compulsions?

Autistic children are frequently reported to show obsessions and compulsions. This terminology implies that such behaviours in autism are similar to those seen in obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, these autistic behaviours fail to satisfy the definitions of either obsessions or compulsions, because essential subjective data (relating to unwantedness, distress, resistance, senselessness and egodystonia) are not available in the case of autistic children. Recent cognitive evidence suggests that this is because autistic children are unable to contemplate or talk about their own mental states. Because of this state of insufficient evidence, it is suggested that the terms obsession and compulsion should be used with considerable caution to describe autistic behaviours. In this paper, the more descriptive term 'repetitive activities' is used. To gain a better understanding of such repetitive activities in autism, functional analyses are needed. Examples of such analyses are discussed, and predictions from a social-cognitive deficit theory of repetitive activities are specifically considered. The paper aims to encourage research into this neglected area.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1988

Social and pragmatic deficits in autism: cognitive or affective?

Autism is characterized by a chronic, severe impairment in social relations. Recent studies of language in autism also show pervasive deficits in pragmatics. We assume, uncontroversially, that these two deficits are linked, since pragmatics is part of social competence. This paper reviews the literature describing these deficits, and then considers two different psychological theories of these phenomena: the Affective theory and the Cognitive theory. Although the Affective theory makes better sense of the results from emotional recognition tasks, the Cognitive theory predicts the particular pattern of impaired and unimpaired social skills in autism, as well as the pragmatic deficits. These two theories might usefully be integrated in the future.

Affect↗